I finished trimming the interior door, since it doesn’t come with trim either. I had to make the trim from skinny sticks and again, it's not the ideal, but at least it's trimmed. The front door did come with interior trim and I glued that on as well.
I trimmed the ceilings with skewers and set them to dry.
While they dried, I glued on the roof that I wallpapered yesterday. It went on extremely easily and with no effort whatsoever. Because I had wallpapered beforehand, I don’t have to worry about all these twists and turns that it has on the inside. It's all done, except for the trim.
Since the roof is drying and I can’t move on to the exterior until it does, I got all the trim done on the second floor. I used skewers for all the trim up here. All of the first floor is done, except for the trim that separates the two wallpaper patterns in the living room. Until the interior trim for the window is put in, I can't put it up. I only did the staircase wall side for now.
I have to stucco first before I can do anything else because the stucco is very messy and it will be very hard to control it to add details like bricks or paint. Before I stucco, I have to figure out how much brick I want on the foundation. The base of this dollhouse is extremely thin , so I’m not going to brick the front of the porch or the back base. I’m going to brick only the walls. I want about a ruler’s thickness of brick on the foundation which is about three rows of bricks. I used the ruler to mark the width all around the bottom of the walls. I won't stucco below that line, so that the bricks can stick to the dollhouse.
I recommend to prime the dollhouse before applying the stucco. Paint it with one coat of whatever color you're planning to stucco it with. This will help the stucco adhere better and no dark wood will show through certain areas.
Now I’m going to mix the stucco. You can mix it with water or latex paint , but I’m going to use acrylics. I’m using an old milk container to do it. It’s Greenleaf 8 oz stucco mixed with an 8 oz bottle of acrylic paint. I’m using a cream tone. I’m making the mixture, somewhat thick because I want a lot of texture. Acrylic paint will make your mixture thicker than if you were to mix it with latex, so have another bottle handy in case you want to thin out the mixture depending on you're project. I didn’t have to thin mine out. The thickness is perfect.
It was impossible to take pictures as I went along because of the extreme mess. Stucco mixture is very messy and applying it is too. I applied it with a large brush, but after I was done covering the whole dollhouse, I went back with a smaller brush to cover very small areas and give more texture to others.
The texture is very rough and visible. The pictures from the camera don’t show it correctly because of the lighting in here, but I think you can still make it out. I love the way it looks. It dries enough to handle pretty quickly, but it won't be completely dry until some hours have passed, so handle it with care.
The brick sheets I got are like a rubber and I wasn’t sure what adhesive would work on them, but it seems that Aileen’s Quick Grab Tacky Glue is doing the job and without the need to clamp anything down. On one side of the dollhouse I have to patch a piece in the back because the strip was not long enough. These sheets, like most sheets of this kind, do not patch up very well, but it's all the way in the back, so it's more hidden. Never patch in the front, always do it in the back, in a not so visible area. I decided to go around the wall corner rather than cut and patch up because of the patching problem with these sheets.
This dollhouse brought window sills, so I painted and glued them to the windows first. It’s best to do this part while the dollhouse is laying on its back. Then I cut some bricks for the bottom of the window sill. I want a piece that’s as long as the sill. All I did was cut a brick strip vertically and then cut off the half part that was left of every other brick, so a long one penetrates each half. You will be able to see this pattern immediately when you have the brick sheet in front of you.
I did the same thing to go up the side of the window, but I only made the strip long enough to reach the curve and then I had to place the bricks individually to create the arch. Dry fit your brick pattern before you add glue to it. Make sure all the bricks fit and then glue them down. After the windows were bricked, I glued in the “leaded” glass. I love the frosted look.
I then modified the roof and porch trim to make gable trim. I painted them red and glued them flat to the gable edge against the wall. I also took the gable finial and modified it to make a trim piece It can lay flat against the wall inside the front gable. I’m planning on buying another type of trim for the roof ridge with a lot of small peaks on it. Since this dollhouse has no tower or flat roof to put a widows walk on, I want the roof ridge trim to be more detailed than just waves.
I made a base for the dollhouse out of the cardboard box it came in. It makes moving the dollhouse around easier since it has brick around the base.
I put the door together and clamped it, so that tomorrow it will be dry enough to make it fit into the opening.
