{"id":9596,"date":"2015-11-27T18:04:44","date_gmt":"2015-11-28T02:04:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.emilymorganti.com\/blog\/?p=9596"},"modified":"2015-11-28T23:16:22","modified_gmt":"2015-11-29T07:16:22","slug":"puzzle-houses-turned-into-faux-gingerbread","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.emilymorganti.com\/blog\/?p=9596","title":{"rendered":"Puzzle houses turned into faux gingerbread – assembly"},"content":{"rendered":"

I just moved from a house that had a dedicated dollhouse workshop<\/a> to one that doesn’t. Eventually we will build a room of some sort into the garage but for now I have a corner of the garage that doesn’t have all the storage and shelving I’m used to. Last weekend I was able to get it sort of organized…<\/p>\n

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When we moved, I got a bunch of see-through bins and tried to pack them in a logical way, since these will be the storage for all my supplies for the foreseeable future. Geoff pushed two tables together to give me a big workspace and I set up the houses in progress where I can reach them easily. The more finished houses are all upstairs in the house (kind of all over the place, though – no dedicated place to display them at the moment).<\/p>\n

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Time to test out this new setup with a new project! My parents are coming to visit in a couple of weeks and my mom and I are going to decorate faux gingerbread houses, which I will assemble and paint before she gets here. She makes real gingerbread houses every Christmas but we tried it here once and the air was too moist – the house basically caved in overnight. (Still yummy though!)<\/p>\n

We’ll use these two Creatology puzzle house kits, which I bought at Michaels several years back. I don’t know if they’re still sold (if yes, they’re usually stocked in the spring\/summer). I built the one on the right a while ago as a half scale cottage<\/a> (the blog posts about that build are here<\/a> if you’re curious). The one on the left, I haven’t done before.<\/p>\n

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We’ll be decorating with fake candy, also from Michaels. Most of it was 40% off in a “pre Black Friday” sale.<\/p>\n

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First I assembled the house I’ve done before. These come with fairly confusing assemble-by-number instructions that I ignored completely. I started with a dry fit. I’m leaving the windows “unpopped” to be more like a real gingerbread house. My mom actually makes “stained glass” windows with melted Life Savers for her gingerbread houses, but I liked the idea of leaving the pop-outs in to look more cookie-like.<\/p>\n

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I generally like painting once the house is put together, but in this case I tried painting first thinking it would be easier to do the inside before assembly. I tried two different colors I had lying around, “Cup of Cocoa” (the lighter one) and “French Truffle” (the darker one). Neither came out particularly gingerbready.<\/p>\n

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In hindsight I shouldn’t have painted the pieces, since paint glopped in the slots and made fitting the pieces together more difficult than the initial dry fit. Lesson learned. I will wait to glue on the roof and dormer until the house is painted inside and out — easier to get my hands in that way.<\/p>\n

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I beefed up the porch with strip wood, same as last time<\/a>. Then I tried a new paint color – this is Glidden “Spiced Gingerbread” and I bought it sight unseen from the Home Depot website<\/a>, which I just learned ships paint samples for free. Added bonus, it was supposed to take a week to get here and only took two days!<\/p>\n

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First reaction: it seems kind of orange. But, the lighting in the garage is funky, and this is only a base coat. I will do a second coat with sand mixed in for texture, and if the color still seems off I can experiment with mixing in other browns.<\/p>\n

While that paint was drying, I tackled the second house. Even though I haven’t built this one before, it was easier to figure out how it went together by experimenting and looking at the picture, than trying to decipher the instructions.<\/p>\n

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This house has a lot of tabs that look like this, which are supposed to slide into pieces that hold the parts in place (cuz it’s a “puzzle house,” get it?)<\/p>\n

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These tabs are hard to get into the slots and I broke some of them when I took apart the dry fit, so before gluing I decided to cut them down.<\/p>\n

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I assembled the main body of the house, using a ton of glue in the seams. It dries clear and will be covered with paint, anyway.<\/p>\n

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Then I flipped the house over and added strip wood to the foundation. This wasn’t totally necessary because the house doesn’t have a gap under the porch like the other style, but I had the wood left over and thought it would look nice. I still need to clean up the corners a bit before painting.<\/p>\n

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Finally, I assembled the top. I inserted the wall pieces into the floor for stability while the glue dried, but only glued the wall and ceiling pieces, so the top can be removed for easier painting. I decided to leave off the dormer and the chimney to keep the house a bit simpler and more gingerbread-like.<\/p>\n

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Here’s where I’ve paused for now. The Spiced Gingerbread doesn’t look quite so orange now that it’s dried, but I had a hard time getting a photo that shows the color accurately.<\/p>\n

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I just moved from a house that had a dedicated dollhouse workshop to one that doesn’t. Eventually we will build a room of some sort into the garage but for now I have a corner of the garage that doesn’t have all the storage and shelving I’m used to. Last weekend I was able to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[54,75,76,19],"class_list":["post-9596","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dollhouses","tag-christmas","tag-creatology-puzzle-houses","tag-faux-gingerbread-houses","tag-half-scale","post-preview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.emilymorganti.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9596","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.emilymorganti.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.emilymorganti.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.emilymorganti.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.emilymorganti.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9596"}],"version-history":[{"count":22,"href":"https:\/\/www.emilymorganti.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9596\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9621,"href":"https:\/\/www.emilymorganti.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9596\/revisions\/9621"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.emilymorganti.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9596"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.emilymorganti.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9596"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.emilymorganti.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9596"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}