Nothing is ever straightforward!

image from The Dolls House Emporium

It certainly looks like it would be a nice straightforward kit to construct, doesn't it?  But nope, I've come across some issues already and I've barely started!

To start with I had a teensy-wee bit of a panic when I opened the box containing the kit, as it seemed like half of it was missing 😱  It then dawned on me that way back in the mists of time, when we were still living in Hitchin, I had dry-fitted the pieces together but didn't get round to actually building the house ~ obviously 😏  When I dismantled it I ended up wrapping most of the big panels in bubble wrap as it was a tad difficult to get them back in the bloody box!  The bubble-wrapped bundle was just minding its own business, sitting with the boxes containing the Montgomery Hall Kit pretending it belonged there 😄

So, panic over, I did another dry-fit run-through of the body of the house although I didn't bother with the roof for the time being.  This is the front of the house, with the living room on the left and a bedroom above.  The hall is on the right with a small room above, which on the box is depicted as being the bathroom.  The house is described as having "seven spacious rooms" but that is rather like optimistic estate agent waffle, as three of the said rooms are really rather on the pokey side!

Front panel temporarily held in place with masking tape.  One of the nice touches to the house is that as well as the usual opening front, it also has opening panels on either side.

  On the left in the photo above is another view of the hall, this time with the staircase taped in position, and the landing.  The hole in the landing ceiling, by the way, is for the loft-hatch.

On the box the rooms on the right are set out as the kitchen, with a nursery upstairs.  These are both pretty small rooms, to be honest, as is the room at the front to the left of the landing.  The area beneath the stairs has potential, though, and I've had various ideas whirring around in my head for what I could do with the space 😄     

Both of the opening side panels are meant to be held in place with magnets, which I'm not keen on at all.  I assume that's why both of these panels are shorter than those that are fixed in place, to give some "wiggle-room" when removing them to access the interior of the house.  I'm still mulling over how to alter this to something that I will find more satisfactory. 

The other side of the house is shown on the box as the dining room, with another bedroom above.

With the side panel in place, which as you can see is where the "back door" is positioned.

As you have probably realised I'm not totally happy with this house as it is, and will therefore be making a few alterations.  However, they won't be as drastic as the changes I started to make to Fernleigh House 😉  I'll be telling you more about them as the build progresses.

Having seen that the picture on the box showed a bedroom up in the roof space, accessed via a ladder, I spent waaay too much time trying to figure out how to fit a proper staircase up there instead.  After all, who really wants to have to climb up a ladder every night to get to bed!  In the end, after giving myself a thumping headache with all the thinking, I decided that I will leave it simply as loft space rather than trying to fit another bedroom up there 😏  Because of the pyramid-shape of the roof, there is very limited headroom up there ~ and no window whatsoever.  Quite apart from having to access the potential room via a ladder, I think you'll agree that it is all very unsatisfactory and wouldn't comply with building regulations in the slightest 😉

  One of the side roof panels is removeable, so I think it will be nice to simply use the space as a straightforward loft for storing all those little things that we like to hold on to "in case they come in handy", or aren't used frequently such as Christmas decorations.

I have an idea of the alterations I want to make and some tentative thoughts regarding how the rooms will be used.  Upstairs is fairly straightforward, in that the two largest rooms will be the master and guest bedrooms.  The largest of the other two rooms (which are both rather small!) will definitely be a bathroom.  I'm undecided at the moment whether to make the other small room into a second bathroom (so that both bedrooms in effect have an en-suite) or an office.

As for downstairs whilst the room at the front will definitely be the living room, I'm still undecided about the layout of the kitchen and dining room.  I do have a couple of ideas in mind, I just have to make a final decision 😄

A completely new build

image from Magnific.com

I know, I know ~ I should just stick with one thing and get on with it but I've really been struggling with Fernleigh House, hence me being MIA since last October 😳

To be frank, for quite a while it was touch and go as to whether it would all end the same way as Augusta Lodge!  In the end, though, I took a deep breath and decided the sensible route would be to put Fernleigh House to one side until I feel more able to cope with totally kit-bashing it.  Instead, I thought I'd work on one of my as-yet unbuilt kits ~ all of which I've had for a number of years and which are still in their boxes 😏

My first thought was the Bellingham Farm House by Duracraft, who I believe are no longer in existence:

(image found on Google)

It's a nice house but as it's an American kit it has an open back, which I am really not keen on.  I knew that to make it work for me, I would most likely have turn the house around so that I could add an opening panel, turning the back into the front ~ if you see what I mean!  The Bellingham has therefore returned to the to-do-at-a-future-date list 😉

The second house I considered was the Montgomery Hall kit from The Dolls House Emporium:

image from The Dolls House Emporium

I must admit that I was very tempted to dive into this one as it's a lovely house...

image from The Dolls House Emporium

and I have the basement that goes with it, too.  In the end, though, common-sense prevailed ~ I realised that it was an awfully big kit to tackle as a "warm-up", as it were, for kit-bashing Fernleigh House 😄

image from The Dolls House Emporium

In the end, I decided that the Mountfield kit, also from The Dolls House Emporium, was the one to work on.  You'll be pleased to know that this will eventually be the home of Ephemy and Susannah, who I told you about in a previous post 😊

I envisage that I will only be working on the house somewhat sporadically until the winter weather sets in.  If you read my other blog you will know that we are in the midst of a big garden project and have to make the most of any good weather that comes our way.  I have made a start already, though, as we've had some rainy days which rather put paid to digging in the garden!  Needless to say, despite having barely taken the pieces out of the box, I've already come across a few issues which I'll share with you in an upcoming post 😏

  

Looking worse...

image from Clipart Library

...before it ~ hopefully 😳 ~ starts to look better!

Apart from the inevitable unrealistic stair situation, I suppose there was nothing particularly wrong with the house but mock-Tudor just isn't a style I'm fond of ~ nor are Ephemy and Susannah, and it is their house, after all 😉 

The rooms on the left, because they are all different depths, have separate opening front panels.  Over time, all the panels have "dropped" a little.  9mm MDF, which is what the house is made from, is quite heavy so I think that the hinges just weren't quite man enough for the task.

Ephemy and Susannah really didn't like the Tudor "stepped" design...

but the question was should the rooms all be trimmed back to the same depth as that on the ground floor, or built out to line up with the top floor 😕

It was extremely difficult to take photos of the ceiling area of the top room on the left-hand side!  However, I did manage it in the end 😏  

I'm not sure what the original plan had been but as a piece of wood had been attached to both the front and back walls (see also top photo), I assume that it had been planned to add a false ceiling.

As you have probably guessed, we had other ideas...

not least, a completely different roof-line!  Luckily the section on the right hadn't actually been fixed in position and just lifted off.

However, I had to cut away the section on the left...

and whilst I was doing that, it was decided that the rooms on the left would all be cut back to the same depth as the one on the ground floor.

Before I started work, I had noticed that the right-hand back wall had pulled apart from the left somewhat.

Luckily my demolition exploits haven't made this any worse, but realigning the wall into its proper position will have to be the first task carried out before any other alterations can be done.

It was decided to stop work at this point so that Sir Peter and I could have a series of discussions with Ephemy and Susannah about what they want done with their new home.  I'm pleased to report that the planning stage is very nearly complete now, so hopefully work can commence shortly!

Fernleigh House

image from Freepik

As per usual, all gung-ho I had made a start on the demolition/alterations to Fernleigh House, when it somewhat belatedly dawned on me that perhaps it might be prudent to make some plans on what actually needs to be done 😏  So work was temporarily halted whilst consultations took place with Ephemy and Susannah as to what they would ideally like their new home to look like, both externally and internally. 

Quite major alterations have already been made to the front of the house, which I will show you in an upcoming post.  Suffice to say not a vestige of the "mock Tudor"-look in the photo above now exists 😉 Discussions are still ongoing with regards to the roofline, and whether it should be completely altered or just made so that the third floor is more accessible for decorating.  It's not as easy to work up there as it might appear!

 As for the internal layout of the house, that's proving to be a little bit of a headache to be honest.  As I mentioned previously the stair openings are very unsatisfactory, as is so often the case 😒  However I think I can make it somewhat better by moving the internal door openings from the back of the house to the front, thereby giving a little more space for the stairs and landings.  The rooms on the left are good sizes, though, even after the alterations that have already taken place.  Likewise, those on the right are okay in theory.  However, on the ground floor the plan is to have the living room on the left and a kitchen/diner on the right.  This, of course, means that it is going to be a rather tight squeeze fitting the latter into the room currently ear-marked for it!

An extension is therefore being seriously considered on the right-hand side, perhaps using one of the many small kits that I've accumulated over the years and never got round to actually building 😏 One kit in particular might be a very good candidate for making into something else.  The question is whether to add said kit to the side of the house or perhaps see if it's at all feasible to add it to the front.  The house itself is made from the usual 9mm MDF but the kit I have in mind is 6mm, hence wondering whether it would be lightweight enough to possibly attach it to the front opening panel 🤔 Regardless of whether it goes on the side or the front, the footprint of the house will obviously have to increase in one direction or the other.  This kit is also double-storey, so it has the potential to create an additional room on the floor above.  This would give a little more scope for what to do with the rooms on the first floor.

Originally it was planned to simply have a guest bedroom and bathroom on the first floor.  However, if an extension is added to the smaller room, then those two rooms could become the guest bedroom and en-suite.  This would then enable the larger room to be used as a second sitting room/study/library combination.

The plans for the top floor are straightforward with the room on the right to be the master bedroom, and a bathroom on the left ~ there will of course be an internal wall put in place for the latter in due course 😉

So that's where things currently stand, with plenty of decisions yet to be made and plans to be drawn up!  Hopefully it won't take too long to sort everything out 😳

The new project...

...and another decision to be made.  As I told you last week, I had already decided to completely scrap Augusta Lodge but I still had a decision to make about Angel House Galleria.

Whilst I really liked the back story I had concocted about Captain Jack, I just wasn't at all keen on the Tudor style of this house.  Another issue, as is so often the case with dolls' house kits, was that the staircase situation was also not satisfactory.  I know some folk leave the stairs out of their little houses altogether but I don't like that idea at all 😏 Whether I went ahead with my original plan to turn the building in a group of little shop spaces or made it into a family home, there would have to be at least some alterations both inside as well as externally. 

 I must admit that by this point I had rather gone off the idea of the shop spaces to be perfectly honest, and didn't want to find myself getting totally frustrated with the project like I did with Augusta Lodge.  So, as I didn't want to scrap this house, I made the decision that it would remain a home 😌 There will be a lot of alterations made over the coming weeks, and it will definitely not be in a Tudor style 😉

I do still intend to have some shops in due course making use of my smaller kits, perhaps stacking them together so that they take up less square floorspace.

And here are the ladies who have taken on this enormous project: Ephemy Lamb and Susannah Lytton, along with their dogs Patrick and Bobby 😊  They recently told me that they aren't sure whether they are being brave or foolish 😄 

Still, I'm sure that they will have plenty of advice from their architect, Sir Peter Buchanan (seen in the photograph above with his mother, Lady Constance and uncle, Christopher Long)...

along with the best building contractors in town, Derek Landry and Albert Holland.  Methinks Graham (Derek's son, who they employ as a painter and decorator) is wondering how long it's going to take him to get all the decorating done 😉 Never fear Graham, there's a helluva lot of work to be done before you'll have to get involved ~ unless, of course, your Dad and Albert rope you in to help with some of the building stuff 😄

Ephemy and Susannah, both 39 years old, have lived together for 15 years although they have known each other a lot longer.  They first met through mutual (older) friends who were celebrating their silver wedding anniversary.  A few weeks later, those same friends invited them both to join them and a few other friends for a long weekend away.  They spent a lot of time together over those few days, and continued to see each other afterwards as they had many interests in common.  Gradually their friendship blossomed into love and they decided to move into a little flat together.

Ephemy is a senior lecturer in culinary arts management at Hazelton University, and Susannah is the practice manager of a very large veterinary practice in Hazelton.  They adopted their two little dogs a couple of years ago, which is one of the reasons they are now looking to live in a larger property.  Susannah is lucky enough to be able to take them both with her when she goes to work, though, so they are rarely left "home alone". 

Patrick is, obviously, a West Highland Terrier.  Bobby, on the other hand, is very much a mongrel ~ no one has been able to decide with any certainty what breeds may be in his ancestry, and suggesting ever-more outlandish combinations has become a running joke amongst Susannah's veterinary colleagues!  They are still young dogs, both being about three years old now, and were picked up together, as strays, on the same day.  The rescue centre suspected they had lived together before being abandoned as they didn't like being apart from each other, so it was decided the two should be rehomed together.

So there we are my lovelies, my new project!  No doubt there will be a lot of trials and tribulations ahead, but I am still looking forward to getting started 😊 

Well, hello there!

image from Freepik

omg ~ nearly a whole year since I last posted here 😮  As you can see I am still alive and kicking, but if you read my other blog you'll no doubt be aware that I've been having some health and mobility issues these last few months.  In my last post on this blog, back in November 2024, I told you about the reorganising I was doing out in my craft room.  That task has been going on, somewhat sporadically, over the last year but rather than detailing everything again, here are a couple of links to the posts on My Cosy Orkney Home if you want to read about it 😊 

https://mycosyorkneyhome.blogspot.com/search/label/chat

https://mycosyorkneyhome.blogspot.com/search/label/the%20craft%20room

Getting back to this blog, you may remember the difficulties I was experiencing with Augusta Lodge.  Well those trials and tribulations have finally disappeared.....because I made a Very Big Decision (VBD) to stop torturing myself and just dump the whole bloody house 😲  This was, for me, an enormous decision and I dithered over it for a very long time.  But omg, the relief I felt when I finally did decide that was the sensible route to take was enormous!  In fact I have made a number of other VBDs over the last year regarding my dolls' houses, which will become apparent over the coming months.

I have started on a new project, which has temporarily been put on hold whilst I finish off sorting out my craft room, but watch out for upcoming posts 😊    

Still nothing to report.....

image from Clipart Library

Well, I say "nothing" but that's not entirely true to be fair to myself 😉

Whilst I haven't yet restarted work on Augusta Lodge, I have been able to make a start on sorting out my craft room.  I posted over on MCOH about the chaos that was once again reigning in said craft room and although it's a daunting task to tackle, I actually made a start out there whilst we were still working in the garden.  I was finding it was getting harder to do quite so many hours in the garden ~ a combination of tiredness and the colder weather.  I compromised by doing just a couple of hours gardening in the morning on the better days, weather-wise, and then another couple of hours or so in the afternoon in the craft room. 

I have also made on start on selling some of the things weeded out thus far, and the things to be donated have now gone ~ some to Restart, and a tub of craft items to Hamnavoe House (the residential elderly care home here in Stromness).  Being the proud (?) owner of a notorious Butterfly Brain, I have managed to acquire a lot of "stuff" over the years to make whatever-the-hell the latest thing to catch my eye has been.  Which, of course, has then sat gathering dust waiting for me to actually make the bloody thing 😏

In the end I realised that enough was enough, and I had to make some serious decisions about how I was going to occupy my time for however many crafting years I may have ahead of me.  Nope I'm not being morbid, my lovelies, just trying to be sensible for once 😉 It always comes back to my love for both crochet and dolls' houses ~ it's impossible to choose one over the other, really.  And in all honesty, why should one be my most favourite?  After all, I have two kids and I don't love one of them more than the other 😄

So the upshot is that my craft room will be mostly devoted to my dolls' houses, although not entirely as there will still be forays into other crafts that I would like to try from time-to-time.  My crochet, of course, is an in-the-house pastime; luckily for me I don't have to find room for my not-insubstantial yarn stash in the craft room, as it lives in the base of the bed in our guest bedroom 😏

There is still an awful lot of tidying/rearranging to do in the craft room though.  We've put gardening on hold now until the spring, so I was hoping to really get stuck in to it now.  Alas I've been thwarted by a run of very wintery weather!  We've had snow and it turned very cold, making the short walk from our kitchen to the craft room a tad treacherous!  And, of course, if anyone is going to slip over on that slope out there it's going to be me 😄  Still, the weather seems to be turning again with Storm Bert sending tentacles of wind and rain up here, so hopefully the snow will be washed away and I will feel that I'm safe to trundle up to my craft room to carry on the good work.  We have family coming up for Christmas this year (yay 👏), so until then I'll hopefully be alternating getting the house ready for our guests with working in the craft room.  It would be so nice to get it all tidy and ready to start working in there once again in the New Year so fingers crossed, eh 😊

In dangerous territory!

image from Freepik.com

I mentioned over on MCOH that Adrian and I have been south to visit family and friends.  As we most often do we travelled off the island by ferry and continued our journey by train, stopping off overnight in Inverness both on the outward and return journeys.  As you can imagine this takes a number of hours by train and after all these years of taking this journey, we both have a cosy routine of watching the passing scenery, reading, and of course napping 😉  Like me, no doubt Adrian does a fair bit of thinking about "stuff" and whilst I have no idea what thoughts were occupying his mind, my own little brain was mulling over what's to be done in the garden and also what to do about the stair situation in Augusta Lodge.

Now this is where the "dangerous territory" comes into play ~ not regarding the garden, I hasten to add, as that's all pretty straightforward.  No, the danger is that I had plenty of time on my hands to think about those bloody stairs!  Which wouldn't be quite so bad if it wasn't for the fact that I can't even make a start on the Lodge until I've got my craft room sorted out 😏

Still, that didn't stop my butterfly brain (BB) having another long think about the situation 😄 I had previously come to the conclusion that dog-leg staircases were the only way to move forward but this was a very reluctant conclusion, to be honest, as I really wanted nice straight runs of stairs.  Unfortunately for me and my "wants" Augusta Lodge just isn't deep enough to properly accommodate such staircases, hence the dog-leg solution.  I was getting rather annoyed with BB for bringing up the thorny subject yet again, when in plopped another thought.....why not make the house deeper 😲

As I'm sure you can imagine, BB was very excited by this new thought ~ I confess that I was somewhat less so!  Still, the idea has been growing on me and could well be the solution I've been looking for.  I already had it in mind to attach a shallow false back to the house to cover the lighting wires, more to keep them all tidy, and hopefully less susceptible to damage, than anything else.  It's a tad unfortunate that BB didn't have this brainwave before I reattached the back to the bloody house 😒

If I do decide to take this route, then I have to decide on whether to remove the back of both the house and the basement or made the addition at the front.  The basement wouldn't be such an issue as I haven't yet glued anything in place.  However the main body of the house would be rather more problematic.  Now that I have re-glued the back I really don't think it would be so easy to remove without causing a lot of damage, which means I would have to cut it off somehow.

It would be fairly straightforward, I think, to add to the depth from the front though.  If I were to build out the house as far as the point where the basement garden wall meets the "pavement", I think that this would give me the extra depth needed.  Of course, all this will need to be carefully measured and planned out, but I really do think it is a possibility.  

The only downside to this is that I would have to scrap my ideas for a courtyard garden, unless I extend the base.  It's not an ideal option, to be honest, as I don't want to make the footprint of Augusta Lodge too big for the position I had in mind for it in the porch.  So now I will have to decide whether I still want that courtyard garden, in which case Augusta Lodge will have to be displayed in my craft room with one of the smaller dolls' houses, yet to be built, put out in the porch instead.

Uh-oh, BB is now floating the thought that if I leave the Lodge in my craft room, then I could probably make that courtyard garden a tad larger than it was originally going to be 😲

Well that's given me plenty to mull over ~ who knows, though, by the time I'm ready to actually start working on Augusta Lodge again BB may well have thought up other stuff to throw in the mix!

Whew.....

image from Clipart Library

Copying the old dolls' house posts over from MCOH didn't take as long as I thought it would, as it turned out that there weren't actually all that many to copy over! I mentioned in my first post  that I don't anticipate working on my dolls' house projects for a while because of all the outdoors stuff to be done.  As soon as I've got my craft room sorted out yet again, though, I'll be back to show off my (hopefully!) spick and span work space and then all being well, I should be able to make steady progress over the winter 😊

I managed to get the copying-over job done whilst I've been waiting for the washing-machine to do it's thing ~ which it has now, so I'd better get the laundry out on the line before the sun buggers off 😉

Happy New Year... (first published on MCOH 2nd January 2024)

image from Clipart Library

 ...albeit a day late!  I hope you all had a lovely Christmas and here's to a fab 2024 for us all 😊

I don't usually go in for new year resolutions as I'm so crap at keeping them, but this year I'm going to try very much harder to blog regularly.  Mind you I couldn't really blog much less than I did last year, so hopefully I'll be a tad more successful in my endeavours!  I also have "good intentions" to be more creative, so I will be attempting A Make-A-Month again this year.  I've got crochet projects to finish plus a long list of new things I'd like to make, both crochet and other crafts.  And, of course, I have all those dolls' house projects waiting for me to get to them 😏

In particular, I really want to finish renovating Augusta Lodge in the next couple of months or so, not least because I will soon have the ideal space available in which to display it ~ more on that in due course 😉  I haven't touched it since the end of last August, mainly because I really got myself bogged down with the issues with the stairs.  Bottom line is I could easily have simply got rid of the bloody thing last year (not sure how I'd explain that to Lady Constance and Christopher, though!), or get on with what I actually decided to do: get stuck in and work through the issues.  Just to warn you in advance, though, be prepared for upcoming Augusta Lodge posts to be filled with whinging, grumbling and angst!

If you too have things you'd like to make, please do join in with me; I'd love to hear about what you are creating and wouldn't feel quite so lonely in my self-imposed crafting challenges 😊

For the next couple of weeks I don't expect to be blogging much, if at all, as I'll be a bit busy with some upcoming "family stuff".  However, I'll be back later this month bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.....well, perhaps not exactly bright-eyed and bushy-tailed but I'll be back nevertheless, and that's the main thing, eh 😉    

Slightly less scary 😉 (first published on MCOH 31st August 2023)

image from Clipart Library

I got out the Sonicrafter to make an actual hole this time, rather than simply trimming off edges.  Now to be honest I really don't know what the various blades are called, but when I trimmed the edges of the upper house base I used a semi-circular one to work my way across in a straight line.  This time I used a rectangular one with the teeth just at one end to make plunge cuts.  There ~ now you know as much as me, in fact I'm pretty sure it's highly likely that you know a helluva lot more than me 😄

I didn't take these photos at a very good angle, so you may have to tilt your head a wee bit ~ sorry about that 😏  Anyhoo, this is what will be the third floor of the completed house and is in effect Lady Constance's floor.  Her bedroom is beyond the wall and I'm taking the photo from what will eventually be her bathroom.

As I mentioned previously the floors below had two doorways so that folk could get from one staircase to the other, but since there was no access up to the attic this floor simply had the doors to the rear of the house.  This does not fit in with my plans so I needed to cut out a doorway at the front ~ the door at the rear will be blocked in later.  I took my time with the measuring ~ you know, all that "measure twice, cut once" malarky 😉  You may be able to see that the original doorways are a little taller than what is needed for the doors I purchased (from Bromley Craft Products if you're interested, who seem to have become my first port of call when I'm looking for stuff!), so there will have to be a little filling-in along the top of the other doorways.

Since I was cutting out a new hole here I was able to make it to the correct dimensions.  I must admit that I found making this doorway a wee bit harder than the trimming I did the other day, but since it's only the second time that I've ever used anything even remotely like the Sonicrafter I'm still pleased with my efforts 😊

Thank goodness, though, for architrave!

Next step is working out how to configure those pesky staircases 😕