Use it sparingly and only on visibly gapped areas. Don’t fill in every joint for no reason. You will end up with visible lines all over your joints. If you made sure your templates sit flush with each other, all of your joints should be nice and even. When you apply the wood filler, don’t get it on the surrounding areas. Keep it on the gaps only. After I applied the wood filler where it was needed, I stained it with the left over roof stain and its invisible.
I touched up the paint of the roof ridges and finials as well.
In the interior, I added a lot of baseboards but I ran out of basswood strips again before I was able to make it to the attic.
I finished all of the interior trim that was left to do and did touch ups here and there.
On the exterior, I also did touch ups with paint and spackle. I printed out some brick to match the chimneys and glued it around the foundation of the dollhouse that didn’t have lattice. I painted the gazebo post spindles with some brown accents. I wanted to bring some of the brown that was on the rest of the dollhouse to the gazebo so it brings the entire scheme together.
This was quite a build but regardless of it's size, it was not a complicated build. Most of the time in this build is taken in planning out how to finish inaccessible areas before they are closed off. There are three inaccessible areas on this dollhouse:
-The front entry.
-The second floor stairwell room over the front entry.
-The third floor attic over the second floor stairwell room.
Basically everything located in the front left corner of the dollhouse, when looking at the dollhouse from the front, is inaccessible. This not only poses a challenge while building and having to decorate at the same time but it will also pose a problem when adding baseboards, crown moulding and window treatments.
Also the front, left, back, sections of the dollhouse are complicated to figure out. You just don’t know what the instructions mean by the “front” of the dollhouse because of its L shape. Well, the front of the dollhouse is the wall with the front door and tower, not the wide side wall with the kitchen door, which is generally what you would think of as the front, because of its width.
Shingling the dollhouse is a pretty large undertaking so the templates will make it a lot easier.
Extra wallpaper is a must if you want to wallpaper the entire attic. Have double the amount of what you would normally use and wallpaper all your roof panels before assembly.
Be very careful with your wall assembly. There are so many walls on this dollhouse that it's easy to accidentally skip one on the instructions. I suggest you mark with a pencil each step in the wall assembly process as you complete it to make sure you didn’t omit any walls. It will be very difficult if not impossible to put in a wall you missed after the others are already up around it.
It took 34 days to assemble this dollhouse, as is. If you add siding or other extras to it, it will take longer to assemble, so plan for an extended assembly.
You can visit this dollhouse gallery here.
