Finished!

Yesterday we put the finishing touches on the dollhouse. Other than a big red bow and a tag that says, "Merry Christmas Clara," it's done!

This house was assembled from a kit made by Real Good Toys, of Vermont. It ended up taking two months and a week to complete. We worked on it almost every day, some days a lot, some days not so much. We really, really enjoyed assembling it. Dan even says he'd like to do another one, now that he knows more about the process. 

The most difficult and time consuming part was shingling the roofs. On all of the corners, and all of the edges around the dormers, the shingles had to be cut precisely, one at a time. Dan used a little saw for most of that, and then he ran the cut edge over a piece of sandpaper to smooth it before gluing it to the roof. In the end, I re-dyed all of those edges, to make them match the rest of the shingles.

Our first attempt at shingling was a failure. The instructions suggested using Liquid Nails, and specifically said no water-based adhesives. I bought Liquid Nails, and Dan started putting the shingles on, but it was a disaster! The shingles were curling and wouldn't stick to the roof. Finally we realized that the glue WAS water-based. Apparently Liquid Nails comes in more than one variety - whoops! We had to remove all of those original shingles and start fresh with Quick Grip glue (from Michael's), which worked well, except that it was hard to keep it from running down the steep sides of the roof. We re-used some of those first shingles, because we were worried that, because of our faux pas, we'd be short. But we weren't. We were happy with how the wooden shingles took the dye, some of them dark, others lighter. It gave the roof a nice, textured appearance.