Newberg build - back at it after a long hiatus

I have a tendency to work on certain hobbies at certain times of year. Beads in the summer. Minis in the winter or early spring. Clay in fall. I haven't forgotten the Newberg - just last week I cleaned my dollhouse table so I could get back to it. I also have a future build (plus three more) in case I ever finish this one. Husband bought me a 1:24 scale Fairfield

 because I'm largely obsessed with the Old Hickory / Knox

house in Coudersport, Pennsylvania and the Fairfield would make a great start for a old junky imitation. I'm so excited about it.

But anyway, back to the Newberg. I've been working on brick work for the foundation.

And I moved the staircase landing because a staircase in what is obviously a kitchen is unacceptable. Now we'll switch temporarily to the captions being under the photos to explain how I moved it. 

As the kit is designed, the stairs would be in the kitchen going from the back of the house to the front. 

I marked off the dividing wall with a light score with a craft knife.

Positing the punch out from the stair case where I'd like them to be, and trace around it, making it fully square because I don't have to account for the notch for the support wall below. 

Put the punch out back in it's original place, flip the board over so it's bottoms up, and add a line of wood glue around the punch out lines.

When it's almost dry, add a couple strips of masking tape just for extra security and flip it right side up.

Add wood glue into the lines on the front, and the number inside the punch out that marked the sheet number.

Handy tip: if you sand while your wood glue is still wet, it makes excellent wood filler and takes care of the gaps while you work.

The new lay out as I chose it to be. The stairs will come down in front of the door so someone coming in will either go straight upstairs or to a room on the main floor. It's more realistic and my tiny kid will still be able to reach in and maneuver her dolls around.

In addition to that, this morning I started cutting porch planks and numbering them on the back so that after I finish painting and grouting the foundation, I can go straight to laying the porch planks with only a few small modifications needed to fit them around the door jamb and porch rails. 

Winner, Winner, Chicken Dinner

Keli Minick is fairly well known in the miniatures world for her hyper-realistic work. She has a blog here where she posts her build progress and some how-to's thrown into the mix. In January she did a giveaway for a shelf of canned goods and to my complete surprise and utter delight I won a shelf. Yay for me!

They will be perfect for the kitchen of my San Franciscan, or maybe in the kitchen of the Worthington since it houses a world famous chef.

Doorbell

I realize that I haven't posted here in forever and that is because, in short, everyone in my house has been disastrously, deathly sick and it's been the longest three months of my life. The houses are all exactly as they were when I last wrote, except the Worthington was moved to the basement to make room in the midst of all the chaos.

HBS has recently announced the Creatin' Contest kit for this year and... I hate it. It says two possible things to me and I'm afraid that 90 other people will have very similar ideas. So I'm going to pass unless I get some stroke of genius inspiration. I'm okay with not participating this year because I still have at least three other houses to work on, including last year's competition piece that I never finished. That piece has a forever home though and will be finished at some point. I will write a separate blog post about where that started and where it is now pretty soon.

Anyway, hopefully things will be rolling again soon.

Waiting in the wings...

I have plans to go pick up a new house tomorrow evening. This is the photo from the listing I found.

Some lovely people on the miniature forum kindly identified it for me as the Artply Worthington. It's about 4' wide and 29" high, so... big. I won't get to it for a while but... Maybe I'll have to bump the Victorian for this. I looked at the listing a few times and passed it by because I'm not a huge fan of Georgian mansions (because I'm a huge sucker for Victorians) and, quite frankly, I think the exterior is ghastly. But it's up for sale for $40, so... the worst that can happen is I'll ignore it and re-sell it in the future. But I'm finding that the more I look at it, the more it screams ideas at me and I'm getting really excited about it.

I've been hard at work on my HBS Creatin' Contest entry the last few days, but as it were, I can't show it. Truthfully, it may not be finished on time and I'm decidedly okay with that - plus it has a forever home in Florida as soon as I get it done and photographed so it's all good either way :-)

Also, I've been cutting egg carton bricks once in a while so I can build up my stash for my Victorian project, but that isn't anything to show just yet. 

So anyway, I just thought I'd drop in and update since I haven't been posting much. Thanks for stopping by :-)

Have a seat and stay a while

These are a table and chairs that were picked up in an antiques shop in North Carolina. Going to re-stain and re-upholster them and use them in my San Franciscan.

No other news to report currently, but I did work on exterior painting last week.