The cottage that thinks it's a banana

Well it must, mustn't it?  After all, the front, base and side walls have been sitting there on my bench with a weight on them for a week now and they still emulating bananas!  The right side wall is nearly flat but I am still not happy with it!


In spite of that I really wanted to see some PROGRESS on Friday so I painted the pieces anyway.  As I told you the other day the 1st floor was already done with floorboards and apart from one part that has come out a bit crinkled it looks pretty good.

So in the morning while Kylie was taking the boys to school and preschool I did the ground floor and the brick walls with a very, very, thin wash of light grey.  More like dirty grey water really.  When that was dry the flagstones had several tones of grey and brown-grey, with a few touches of dark brown, sponged on randomly using a makeup sponge.

The brick surfaces were also sponged, using terracotta with a little bit of brown mixed into it.  When that was dry on the brick areas it was dry-brushed with black to age it.  Then the rendered areas received a coat of cream paint and that was also distressed/dirtied up by dry-brushing when the cream was dry.

I made the mistake on the left side (brick) wall of letting the edge of the sponge onto the surface and you can see that the paint is too heavy in that area.  I guess a bit of greenery will have to hide that bit!
After all the paint was dry each piece was sprayed with water on the back (wooden) side and covered with foil.  I stacked them one on top of the other, placed two housebricks on top of them and then the water container rather precariously on top of that.  If all of that doesn't flatten everything I'm not sure what I'll do next lol!
As you saw from the photo of the first floor, it is slotted into the dividing wall.  So at least I can go ahead and start papering that dividing wall and the rear wall while I am waiting for the other walls to flatten out.  And the grooves are already cut on the underside of the floor, into what is the ceiling of the ground floor, for the lighting.  So I can go ahead with the rather fiddly business of inserting the wires and covering them over with wood filler - that takes a bit of time.  But not as long as deciding what sort of light shades to make for each room.
Keep tuned - what momentous decisions are to come lol!  And of course there are the flowers - lots more flowers.