Monday and Tuesday 19th & 20th July, 2010

Stage One completed – Stage Two begun

Stage One is what I call the house itself.  It looks pretty good, even if I do say so myself! And here it is, with the beautiful and delicate wooden windows and doors attached. I tried to do the PVC glue thing with the window panes but couldn’t get it to work, but fortunately had some very thin plastic sheet tucked away left over from other quarter scale projects and was able to use that.

It’s interesting that tonight the photos have come out looking paler than the roof is in reality, whereas in other lights the plaster comes out darker.

 Here’s a view of the side window. It also shows the outside Alcove Trims, which flank the front door.

Because the house has a plastered interior, there are no inside window trims. But I have put in strips of stained wood trimmed to sit the bottom of the window, for sills. They will look nice with little things on them.

The next photo beneath shows a close-up of the inside, showing the window sill. The same shot also shows the ladder that I made. I used the pattern supplied, and after it was all dry I sanded all the edges to give them a rounded and uneven, worn appearance before I painted it.

And here is a photo of the rear of the house, with the doors and windows attached.

Then it was on to Stage Two. That’s my name for doing the base. I had bought a mould from Suzanne & Andrews when I bought the kit, especially to try out for forming the rocks for this base. This is what it looks like; the black around it is because it’s sitting on my computer:

I found it good to use except for the fact that once again I started rather late in the evening and of course then had to keep going – far into the early hours of the morning in fact. Not a great idea because I started to mess things up. But I did get it finished and today I painted the ‘rocks’. And that’s when I realised that I have glued the annexe trims on upside down lol!

 Here’s the front view, showing both layers of base glued together and the house attached to the base:

These photos of the side views show that there are small areas on each side of the house for gardens, as well as the large front area on the lower base. On the right side there’s not much room but there’s a little more on the left.

I also notice that on the rear some of the rocks have chipped off. I will fix them later, when I work on the walls each side of the stairs. I had glued the section back on but moving the house around to photograph it must have dislodged it again and it has disappeared.

I still have to finish working out the stairs before I can start landscaping. I have done the basic structure out of foamcore but want to cover that with Creative PaperClay and decide what surface to put on it. The instructions with the cottage don’t specify anything, and the illustration just has them with a greyish finish. I think I’ll do a similar finish, but give it some markings as though it is cut stone slabs. So that will be my aim for tonight.  And of course fixing up those Annexe trims.  Once the brickwork is all done, then my self-styled 'Stage Three' - the landscaping, can begin.