Doors, Rooms and Bricks

Inside of front panel with bathroom, library, living room, ...

... kitchen, and staircase

I decorated the inside of the front panel to match the rooms so the rooms would still look complete with the doors open and so the curtains will match the door finishes. The base board is just a pice of veneer that is used for the floors. The thinness of the veneer will allow the doors to close while still matching the trim in the rooms. 






I had to cut the chair rails on the front short so they would not interfere with the rails in the main portion of the room that I wanted flush with the the wall faces.

Genevieve has been reading lots of books to earn furniture pieces and so with her in charge of the interior decorating it is finally time to move on to completing the exterior of the house.

Top of the stairs and teddy relaxing on the bed

A view of the right side of the house

With Genevieve now responsible for the interior decorating, my attention is finally turning to the outside of the house and the brickwork.

The bricks...I estimate that I will need to apply about 10,000 bricks to complete the exterior.

A victorian house would have been built in bricks using a flemish bond pattern. Unfortunately, I could not find any pre-made paper or product that used flemish bond, so I decided to make my own bricks. Also, I wanted to add some polychromatic brickwork inspired by various english buildings. 

To make the red bricks, I first painted fine sandpaper (220 grit) with slightly different shades of terracotta paint and then speckled some sheets with black and white highlights to create some variation typical of older bricks. For the cobalt bricks, I used a blue-black paint and then added slight highlights of black and purple. Once I had the sheets of sand paper, I then had to cut them in to bricks. 

Strips of sandpaper noodles waiting
to be cut up in to bricks

Standard english bricks were 9" x 4 1/2" x 3" which at 1:12 scale is 3/4" x 3/8" x 1/4". Luckily I had a shredder that cut 1/4" strips, so I ran the sheets through the shredder and ended up with a pile of noodles. These then had to be cut in to 3/4" and 3/8" lengths as the stretchers and headers. For this I placed blue masking tape on my cutting board so I could cut 12 strips at a time. 

Tubs with both full and half bricks
in both terracotta and cobalt (blue/black)

Genevieve did an excellent job of sorting the stretchers and headers in to tubs for ease of application.

The wax modeling tool is great for pushing the bricks in to place and the corks are used to press the bricks firmly against the wall as the glue dries. Unfortunately, the cats love to play with the corks so unless I pack them away in one of the tubs, I have to open another bottle of wine to continue.

Brick pattern for gable end and guide

I laid out the brickwork pattern using brick pattern template created using a spread sheet. This allowed me to check that the pattern would be reasonably symmetrical within the limits of the brick size and building dimensions.

I was actually surprised that the applied bricks matched the pattern to the brick. I was expecting slight variations in the hand cut bricks to throw me off.

The first of many bricks

Here is the first section of the bricks applied to the gable end. I expect that some slight brick adjustments will be needed to match the pattern as the two sides join over the window but so far it is working out. Where the gray walls show through, the gaps are the mortar joints.

Having started the brickwork I now see that I will need to fill in the quoins under the eaves, oops!

Genevieve,
Seamus (ginger),
and Max (tabby)

Genevieve waiting patiently for the dollhouse with some of her best friends.