Friday, 9th July 2010

Our daughter's birthday - and I make a start on Storybook Cottage at last!

Our youngest daughter is 32 today, and of course we gave her a gift, but I gave myself a present as well:I started on the Storybook Cottage.  Finally!  I spent yesterday organising my workroom, redoing the labels for all the containers that I have so far managed to retrieve from the storage container so that the printing on all of them is uniform (yes, I know it's anal) and each says whether the contents are 1:12th scale, 1:24th scale or 1:48th scale.  I only have one house and one kit in half inch scale, and one little container of bits to go with it, so that doesn't take up much room.  Two thirds of the rest of my miniatures shelving is taken up by 1:12th scale, and one third by 1:48th scale.  Partly because everything to do with 1:48th scale is of course much smaller vbg. There's not much room left on those shelves and still a lot more to bring in from the storage shed when I can get the menfolk moving to hunt them out, and I have no clue where I am going to put them all!

But that's to worry about another day.  Today I pulled out the Storybook Cottage kit, rolled up the sleeves and got going.  I like the suggestion to  put little bits of masking tape on each piece and write what they are on them, so you don't get them confused. It's very helpful.

The dry fit showed me that this is certainly not going to be a walk-over, and that is really good. I was a bit confused because there seems to be a gap between the floor and the walls, but then I realized that this is probably to make allowance for the plastering on the inside of the walls.


I’m glad that I did this step. It gives me a much better idea of how things go together.  It also gave me a pretty good idea of the size, so I can start thinking about how much furniture I can put in the rooms.   And I really like the way the base is two layers to give a dimensional effect to the garden.  I played around with it a little bit and am considering changing the angle the house sits on the base.  That will involve filling in the rear section, which is okay.  I have to talk to the people that make the perspex covers for me, to see how much I can fiddle with the shape of the base.

The rear view (picture right) looks rather wonky, because I couldn’t get the 1st floor to stay in place – and it kept slipping progressively further down as I took more photographs. Of course, having all that masking tape doesn’t help the appearance at all either!

The rest of it today was a lot of preparation work before there can be any construction: staining the flooring, painting bits and pieces. But it’s always such a pleasure to start a project, isn’t it? And of course I’m already planning how to furnish, and what the ‘story’ that goes with the cottage.

So the pieces are all drying and waiting to be assembled tomorrow night. The timber floors look really nice, painted and then spray varnished with a matt varnish, the trims are all done with burnt umber paint and the walls are all prepped with cream paint ready to take the plaster.

I won’t be working on it until tomorrow night now which gives everything time to dry thoroughly. The varnish needs eight hours and I don’t want to mess that up while I’m trying to glue the walls to it. But preparation always takes quite a while then pays off later.

One of the major attractions of Storybook Cottage is of course the garden at the front. There’s scope for lots and lots more plants. I already have the twig bench, and some flower kits that will be a good start.  It will be interesting to see how long this takes to do.