The Fourth Wall...

 

Wallpaper....

I don't know about you, Dear Readers, but I always forget about the "Fourth Wall" of my houses! I suppose it is because the kits usually made in America don't include an actual wall, but leave the "back" of the house open for ease of playing. I have always loved the idea of the completely closed dollhouse... with hinged doors for keeping the dust and stray pests from invading. So far my houses are mostly open on the "fourth wall" side, but I am thinking more and more of changing that! Meanwhile, the construction of the Dollmaker's Studio, being a hodge-podge of kit bashes, didn't start out with the fourth wall as part of the plan. At some point I added the fourth wall to the ground floor (remember this initially was the great addition to the too small Sugarplum Cottage kit which has no fourth wall) making it a lovely enclosed room. With hinged opening doors.... (have I mentioned that I Love hinges?) And because the ground floor was now enclosed, the upper floors would also need to have opening doors on the "fourth wall". You can see those doors in the above picture (the third floor ones have still not been constructed).

 And if you are familiar with the Sugarplum Cottage Kit, you will know that it has a very cute front porch with little benches beside the door. This is actually one of my favorite parts of this kit! But in this kit bash, the porch is elevated one story from the ground... making the porch unnecessary. But because it is one of my favorite parts... I decided to make it into a balcony instead. And then when I realized how much the door to the porch used up valuable wall space inside the room... I decided to reverse its location to the "fourth wall", the opening wall. You can see in the above picture the closed-in altered front wall of the Sugarplum kit where the porch would have been. I even had carved the new door opening slot into the foundation extension before deciding to make it a feature of the "fourth" front opening wall. Which is why there is a "door to nowhere" in that front opening wall (see the first picture). All of this is a way of saying that there were quite a few challenging adjustments needing to be carefully fitted to make the front opening wall have a cute porch attached to it!

Starting with the addition of the 

porch support to the opening door.

(I apologize for the dark pictures... 

it was so hot on the weekend

 I had all my window shades closed...)

And you might have noticed on the first picture

 that all the screws for the hinges

 are poking through the too thin wall...

Requiring lots of added "strip wood" to hide them.

 

Here you can see the one on the inside of the front opening door.

Here the door is separated from the building.... 

you can see the added trim on the door frame

 and the door itself (covering the screw tips).

I needed to get the porch and door framework started

 before I could add the wallpaper to the inside of the front walls!

 

Here you can see the Sugarplum porch pieces

 have been stained and glued together.

(I didn't have enough hands to hold it all together

 for fitting without gluing it).

But they are not attached to the building yet. 

I will be making some changes!

But they fit on the door and the door

 swings open without interference.

I added a large baseboard on the interior of the opening wall doors

  in part to cover the screws I used to secure the porch support beam.

And here you can see the door trim being added to the porch door.

Making the arched sections will take more time,

 but can be done after the wallpaper is attached.

Here you can see both doors with the wallpaper....

(at the kitchen table where the light is better!)

And an inside view seen through the alcove window.....

The window will require fitting and trimming too.

Here's the exterior view with the porch in place 

(although it leans out because it is not fastened yet)

it will need railings and perhaps a roof.

And with the doors open (and the flash on)

you can see that at least the wallpaper is all done!

I do like the way it is looking!

And here you can see that no progress at all

 was made on the ornate ceiling trim.

 

It always Amazes me, Dear Readers,

 when the pieces of the puzzle start to come together

 and they look as good as I imagine.

Seeing the Wallpaper on the fourth wall

 really makes a difference!