Then I added my roof panels. They need to be clamped with hand held weights until the glue dries.
As you can see cutting off the interior portion of the chimney, does not affect the exterior portion, protruding from the roof of the dollhouse. So, you can still have a chimney without taking up any interior attic space.
Mansard Roof
Do yourself a favor and cut out your mansard roof panels from stiff poster board. It will make your life so much easier if you do. This is my number recommendation for this kit.
This dollhouse kit does not have composite, wood veneer, mansard roof panels like the Beacon Hill Dollhouse. Composite panels are easily curved and very user friendly. With the Willowcrest, you are getting scored, plywood panels and even with the scoring, they are extremely difficult to get into place and to also curve the way they are suppose to. Sometimes they break at the score line and this causes the mansard curve to look buckled, rather than curved. You will be struggling with these wooden panels, unnecessarily. These panels might be changed to composite ones by Greenleaf Dollhouses, when the new re-released Willowcrest Dollhouse kit becomes available again.
Once you have your panels cut out of poster board, they are very easily installed. Dry fit and cut more to fit.
I chose a black poster board because my shingles will be charcoal. With the black background, you will not be able to see light areas between my dark shingles. Try to find poster board in a color that is similar to your planned shingle finish and if you can not, then you must paint your poster board to match your shingles.
I added Victorian trim over my top mansard roof fascia.
Copper Barrel Roof
I used copper paint to paint the barrel roof sections. I then installed them. There are going to be a lot of gaps in this roof assembly but as you add parts to it, the gaps will disappear. I used black sandpaper to cover the top and side roof pieces of the barrel roof. Covering these parts gives them a nicer look because it hides all of the gaps.
You can replace your copper roofs with stiff copper paper but not only is the paper hard to find, I happen to like the scored lines of the curved roof. I am using copper, metallic, acrylic craft paint. The copper paint works very well. It looks just like copper. The pictures really do not do the finish justice as the flash distorts its hue but the barrel roof looks like its made of real copper. It even has the uneven patina that you would have in real copper roofing. I applied the copper paint right to the roof but everyone has a different method of doing this. Some like to paint the parts black or gray and then apply the metallic paint over it and others like to cover the parts with poster board or brown paper and use the metallic paint over that. There is no wrong way to do this. Do what works best for you. You can also use spray paints or other types of metallic paint. You would just need to spray your parts way from the dollhouse, in order to protect it.
I will be making the entire top roof of this dollhouse copper using this paint but that will take a lot of work.
Copper Top Roof
I began by applying strip wood along the joints of the top roof. There were massive gaps there.
If you are not making your top roof copper, I recommend covering it with sandpaper. Cover each section at a time and join the sandpaper closely together at the roofs joined edges so you can hide those gaps. You can paint strip wood to match your sandpapers color and apply them like I am doing, if the sandpaper ends up not doing a good job hiding these gaps. You can also use texture on your roof like I did on my first Willowcrest Dollhouse. It will take a lot of texture to hide those gaps though.
After the roof joints are hidden with the strip wood, I have to continue applying wood strips along all of the roof panels. This will simulate the copper beams that copper roofs have. I ran out of strip wood so I will return to this roof later. It still needs a lot of work.
