Doll House for Me – Phase 3

Continued from:  Doll House for Me – Phase 2

In the doll house my sister and I built for her grandchildren and in the one we built for her which was almost exactly like it, we used three different wood flooring options.  In the one for her grandchildren, I used some mahogany strips I had left over from my Chris-Craft boat for the first floor…

…and some cherry veneer that my sister cut into squares for the second floor.

In the doll house we built for her, we used walnut veneer that she cut into ½ inch strips that I subsequently cut into individual planks of varying length.

It was this latter flooring that she and I both liked the best and so I chose this for my flooring.  I purchased the veneer sheets and had them shipped directly to my sister.  She then, once again cut them into ½ inch strips using her Cricut.

But unlike those two doll houses that had unfinished floors necessitating installing some kind of flooring, my doll house came with pre-finished floors.

To accommodate my modified flooring option, there were several steps that I needed to do.

For the first floor, I knew it would be easy as all I had to do was flip the floor upside down and use the unfinished bottom (the pre-finished floor thus facing down inside the foundation).

For the second floor, it was a bit more challenging since I could not just use the floor upside down as the cutout for the stair opening would be at the wrong end of the house.  Plus, the lengthwise cuts that created the individual planks in the faux wood finish left a ridge along each cut that I would need to sand down so as not to have peaks and valleys in the floor.  I used my electric palm sander and with very little effort, it not only sanded down the ridges, but it also completely removed the paper faux wood finish yielding a perfectly flat unfinished surface for my custom flooring.

With both floors now ready for my alternative flooring, I employed the same technique as before.  I first laid down strips of two-sided carpet tape, followed by applying individual strips of the ½ inch walnut veneer that I had cut into various lengths from 2” to 6” to give a random pattern with offset joints.  The final step was to run over them with the Brayer roller to ensure the strips were perfectly flat and secured to the tape.

Once I had used the same technique on the second floor, they were both ready for sanding smooth and applying polyurethane.

On a nice warm fall day in October, I took the floors outside, sanded them first with 400-grit sandpaper followed by 800-grit sandpaper, carefully removed the sawdust, and then applied two coats of polyurethane (those little strips of wood to the right are door thresholds).

With these custom floors finished, I could then install the kitchen and bathroom flooring.

I chose to use the same flooring that we had used in my sister’s house, just reversing them using the black and white faux tile floor for the second-floor bathroom and the multi-colored tile in the first-floor kitchen.

After one final step of painting the bottom of the second floor white since it was the ceiling for the first floor, I was ready in earnest to start the assembly of the doll house.

After months of painting, sanding, painting, building subassemblies, and then installing all of the floors, it was nice to see the house really begin to take shape.

Once the doll house was completely dry, I could then begin to build the porch using the railings and post bases I had previously painted and assembled.

But before I added the porch columns and the porch roof, I needed to do something about the door.

The door that came with the house was not really a Craftsman Style exterior door.  While it had looked nice on my oldest sister’s Beach Bungalow doll house…

… it really did not fit with the Craftsman Style of this doll house.  My sister the artist correctly pointed this out to me and encouraged me to use a different door.  We searched online but could not find a suitable alternative.  Then she said, “you know you could build your own door.”

Woah, I had not thought of that.  I pondered her suggestion for a while and then decided she was right.  I searched online, this time for a full-size Craftsman Style door, and after looking at many options, I found one I liked.

On my computer screen, the door measured three inches tall and so I used proportions to scale this up to my 1/12 scale door.  I removed the existing kit door to measure its dimensions as I planned to use the door frame that came with the kit.  Searching through all my scrap pieces of basswood (I always save leftover pieces), I found what I thought I needed.  But when I started piecing it together, I discovered the door would be too thick.  Then I recalled a helpful video I had seen on the doll house manufacturer’s website how you could warm up dried glue with a hairdryer and then pry the pieces apart.  I managed to do this successfully without breaking any pieces.

With these parts, I could basically just add the bottom solid piece with vertical strips and create a six-lite window at the top.  I had the pieces I needed for that but then I noticed an unsightly gap between the door edge and the door frame of almost an 1/8 of an inch (in full scale, that’s almost a 2-inch gap)!  So instead of reusing the horizontal cross pieces, I cut new ones that were just a tad longer.

My sister learned the hard way when assembling some wooden furniture that if you got any glue on the exposed wood surface, it would not accept stain.  So, I stained the pieces individually before gluing the door together.  I stained them with a Mahogany stain that almost matched the walnut flooring I had installed.  Once assembled, I applied polyurethane to give the door a nice semi-gloss finish.

I am so glad my sister suggested I make my own door as this really is a Craftsman Style door.  In hindsight with some of the challenges I met when custom building the door (which I did not bore you with the frustrating details), it would have been much easier if I had just lived with the door gap and reused most of the kit door pieces.  But being a perfectionist, I couldn’t do that which meant I only reused the two long side pieces of the kit door.

       To be continued…