Needless to say this Impressed Emily to no end! she was running screaming with her hands above her head lie the woman that get stuff on the Oprah's favourite things show.
I lined the door and window holes with more slotted batons. making the structure stiffer and stiffer as I went.
No house is complete without a roof, so up went some trusses and i made a little patio outside the front door. i had paint left from painting my house and covered the entire structure with a couple of coats to seal and cover the wood.
With it being easier to paint a room where you can stand up straight, i decided to get most of the painting done before the roof went on. All the trusses got a coat of Plascons "Carrot Muffin", and i painted the inside of the house the same colour as Emily's bedroom. Had to putt a tarp over the top since it started raining and the roof was not up yet...
I took some more of the sheets and cut them into strips fr the roof. A friend let me use his nail gun to get the sheets onto the roof. After being very sceptical of the nail gun idea i must say that after having used one, the sincere need to have one in my tool kit settled on me in earnest. Now I just need to convince my wife. the entire roof got coated in a water based bitumen type product and then painted with roof paint.
Things got a bit busy and the house stayed like this for a couple of months. Until last week when my wife reminded me that the house still needs a door. I remembered an old folding desk that we converted into a shelf by removing the desk top. I thought that a solid pine stable door would do the trick and proceeded and cutting up the old desk top. I routed a lip so the doors could hook into each other and made a heart shaped peep hole in the upper door. these then got hung with some cabinet hinges, and it looked pretty cool.
Everything then got taken off, sanded down and varnished. In anticipation of this door i had turned some door handles on my little lathe and made something up so that there would be some way to grip the door.
The handles got mounted on the door with some sliding bolts on the inside to connect the upper and lover door and to "lock" the door into the door frame. I added a little piece of off cut wood to the lower end of the door frame to ensure that the door could not be pushed past closed by an over enthusiastic little one.
Inside of the house needed some touch ups so i repainted the ceilings and the touched up the trusses. the skirtings also got painted. no little cottage under a fig tree is complete without some terracotta tiles so next i taped some masking tape on the floor and painted the floor. .
The end result was pretty pleasing, Emily loves it and all her dolls have had a meal in her "new" house.
