Some Trim Issues...

Occasionally, despite your best efforts (and mine), things don't fit together quite right.  Even with practice, and, in my case, years of experience, mistakes still happen--we measure wrong, cut wrong or just plain think wrong.  The good news is, most mistakes are easily fixable.  Don't panic, don't beat yourself up--do remain calm and assess, exactly, what is going on.  Some common issues...

Ripped wallpaper--you pulled the masking tape off the wall, and the wallpaper came, too.  Sometimes, if it's just an edge, you can glue it back into place.  Carefully--and gently--dab a small amount of white craft glue onto the underside of the tear, and press the wallpaper back into place.  Make sure you have clean fingers, and use very gentle pressure to rub the paper back into place.  Always rub toward the tear, never away.  If an entire spot of wallpaper is gone, then you might want to consider changing the decorating scheme of the room.  The good news is, nobody knows what your final design is supposed to look like!  Strategically added baseboard, chair rails or even floor to ceiling paneling is going to disguise almost any flaw.

Gaps in your trim.  Below, you can see that there's a small gap between the window and the window casing--how ugly!  Here, I'm adding a small bead of paint, which is filling it in.  This also works well for gaps in crown moulding.  However, if you're adding paint to crown moulding after you install it, make sure you use masking tape to protect the wall and ceiling--otherwise you might end up with a big blob of trim paint where you don't want it!

Sometimes, you wind up with even bigger gaps--gaps that no amount of paint can fix.  This is from a roombox I've been working on over the past week.  The room has twin inset bookcases in the wall.  I thought, when I did the design, that I'd accounted for the depth of the wainscoting adequately.  When I inserted them into the wall, the bookcases were supposed to lie flat against the framing trim.  As you can see, clearly, they were supposed to...but they didn't.  It's a little hard to tell from this picture, but the gap was quite sizable--about 1/16".  That's fairly small in a real house, but huge in a dollhouse.

I cut a second layer of framing trim from 1/8" quarter round trim.  Below, you can see it where it's going to go.  I wanted to make sure that it fit snugly and securely before I finished it.  As it happens, I liked the bookcases better with the second layer of framing trim.  Mistakes are really just opportunities to learn new things and, sometimes, they force us to be more creative with our designs than we might otherwise be.  

Are there any other trim issues that you want me to discuss?  

Disaster Strikes!

By now, if you're following along with me and building your dollhouse, you're probably stuck.  I'm deducing this, because it happened to me the first time I built a dollhouse.  And the second.  And...the fourth.  I think the fifth dollhouse was the first dollhouse I actually finished.  I'd be going along, reasonably happily, and then something horrible would happen.  I'd regard my workbench in mute horror, feet rooted to the floor, as realization washed over me.  "Oh, no!  This is the end!"  Inevitably, I'd become so discouraged that I'd give up.  Don't let this happen to you!

Is it boils in your wallpaper?  Flooring that just doesn't stick to the floor?  Post your issue, and while I can't promise to fix it, I can certainly offer my best "how to get un-stuck" advice.

In the meantime, I recently had quite the disaster in my own studio.  I had this great idea for a new flooring idea--hand painted marble tiles.  If you visit my website, then you know that I love faux finishes.  I figured, hey, I know how to faux finish a tabletop, so I must also know how to faux finish a floor.  So, I gathered up my wood blanks (about 40 1" tiles for one small bathroom in my current dollhouse), sanded, gessoed and painted them.  These last three steps represented about half a day's worth of work.  Seriously, faux finishing can be labor intensive.  I finished the tiles, sat back and admired them...little did I know!  Disaster lurked just over the horizon....

I epoxied the tiles into place in the bathroom.  Those tiles should have been there for the rest of my life.  I weighted them, and I let them dry.  Overnight, I let them dry.  I removed the weights and I applied a coat of Mod Podge.  Now, as you know, if you're a regular reader of this blog, I use Mod Podge all the time--and I lay floors all the time.  I use exactly the same technique when I lay parquet floors.  Secure in the knowledge that the floor is going to look great, I went to dinner.  When I came back from dinner, lo! and behold, my floor dreams were now nightmares.  I had never seen such extreme warping in my entire life.  Needless to say, I tried to fix the problem.  I tried everything: glue, weights, sanding, cutting, everything I could think of.  It was horrible.  Eventually, two days later, I had to admit that all of my efforts at salvaging the floor only made it worse.  So, I did what any smart girl would do--I attacked the dollhouse with a chisel.  Specifically, I used a chisel to remove the floor.  An hour, and some sweat and tears (but, luckily, no blood) later, I was back to square one.  I sanded down the plywood and did what I probably should have done in the first place--laid a nice commercially available tile sheet.

If you're in this position right now, then it's important to hang tough.  Mistakes are the price of innovation and experimentation.  Yes, if we stick to what we know, then we get predictable results.  Now, I'm not knocking predictable results--it's important to build up an arsenal of techniques.  99.9% of the time, we're going to be using that arsenal.  However, there's only one way to add to that arsenal--and it isn't doing the same thing over and over again.  The risk we take, here, is that we become so comfortable that our work stagnates.  All of our rooms begin to look the same.  We become boring.  No!  Sure, you lose a few hours, or even days or weeks, of time--not to mention, occasionally, a wealth of supplies.  But really, who are you doing this for?  You're not a miniaturist to please someone else.  This isn't a race, although sometimes it can feel like one.  Remember, you're not making mistakes, you're learning new skills.  Hang in there, you can do it!

Problem Avoidance!

Yes! You, too, can practice problem avoidance! It goes like this: before you put together the shell (or start doing anything, if it's already put together), practice a construction "dry run" in your mind. Where are the doors? Where are the windows? Is there any part of the house that's going to get blocked off? The Hampton features a "secret room" to the right of the bedroom and directly behind the bathroom--if I put it in before doing any of the finishing, then I'd pretty much be making it impossible for myself to paint the walls, add flooring or add a ceiling. Below is a picture of the floor without the walls, which form the secret room, installed.

Instead, I build the house without the secret room, and put the walls that form it aside for later. I'm not going to do all the finish work to the room before I install it, but I am going to do about half of it--the walls, flooring, and ceiling (but not the trim).