Working From The Bottom Up

I left you last week with the promise of showing more of the vaulted ceilings in a later post. So that is where I will begin tonight. First let me remind you that I jumped in to building my Dream Castle Dollhouse after finding Nina's very inspiring blog about her Medieval Tudor Dollhouse Project. I must also credit her with the (to me) very brilliant idea of completing each room starting at the lowest level BEFORE adding the ceiling (which is obviously the floor of the above level) because it is so much easier to manage all the details while the ceiling is out of the way! I have always been inclined to think in terms of completing the whole shell first - more of a working from the outside in method - so it was truly a novel and EXTREMEMLY useful idea! But it really is a completely different way of thinking about the project for me.......I just have to learn to plan and think through and build or buy ALL the parts of each room before moving on up to the next one.

As I mentioned in my last post, my castle is made up of two tall towers, each with four floors, flanking the central Great Hall which is three stories tall, but only has two floors as the Hall itself is two stories tall. I began work on the towers first, beginning with the dungeons below the Chapel, and the stables on the bottom level of the Guard Room Tower. Now, in my imagination, neither of these rooms was where I had invested a lot of fantasy over the years. But once I had decided that the Great Hall would be above the kitchens, I realized that the chapel and guard rooms would need a "basement" level below them. The obvious choices were the dungeons and the stables. And because Nina's method makes SO MUCH SENSE to me, I was determined to get those useful rooms built and move on to the more "interesting" ones as soon as possible! So I jumped right in. But here I will have to confess that I have not REALLY stuck with Nina's method......I have MOSTLY finished the first level of rooms before moving up to the next ones....but not really in all their details. And I have cheated by moving on to the next room on the BOTTOM level before completing any of them! And I really bend the rules by leaving the ceiling removable for a very long time......! But more on that later.

So It was while I was trying to quickly get the dungeons (and the hidden postern stairs) built so that I could move up to work on the chapel where I had all kinds of exciting ideas roiling in my head, one of which was to paint a beautiful frescoed ceiling in the chapel, with vaulting and carved stone ribs and.....and ....and......that I realized that the dungeon level was going to NEED to be vaulted like a stone cave in order to be at all realistic. In fact, it was going to be the perfect place to PRACTICE making vaulted ceilings! In one of my books I found a beautiful photograph of the magnificent vaulted ceilings of the cellars of Fountains Abbey in the North of England. It had just the stone ribbing and brick infill look I was imagining. My version is only a pale imitation of the real one if you ever get a chance to compare.



So here are the beginnings of the vaulting. I cut arched shapes from plywood the length of the diagonal dimension of the room, intersecting at the center of the room. Here they are notched on the ends to fit around the beam that supports the floor above, and they only extend to the edges of the interior walls of the dungeon and stairway. But they are angled to appear as though they continue through the walls. I glue them to the ceiling board, leaving the whole piece removable by sliding it out. (So you can continue to work on it easily!)

When I was making this I had no idea I would be a blogger soon, and even less of doing a tutorial -so there aren't enough photos to really show the process. :(
Here you can see the corrugated cardboard cut to fit between the ribbing and glued in place. The corrugations allow you to crease the surface in the direction you want the rows of bricks to appear to line up. It is important to position the corrugations in the right directions relative to the vault ribs.

The ceiling was then given a coat of primer and a base coat of paint. I am using interior latex house paints because of the quantity needed and because I already have it in the colors I want to use. In this case I started with a light gray, but then realized the "mortar" would need to be a darker color to look realistic ie. old dirty and maybe mostly missing....you see, I couldn't decide if my ceilings were "dry stone" with no mortar - a really old method....or just really dark old mortar between the bricks. Either way it needed to be dark. So here is a shot of the dark lines painted on the corrugations, and the cross lines for the bricks. I really like the graphic quality of this shot........

Then I added the brick colors.....using a full range of earth tones mixed randomly to get a brick look.........

And I painted the mortar lines in the stone walls of the dungeons....and dirtied them up a bit. I think I will need to go back in and add another layer or two of grime at some point.....

Meanwhile, I was also starting on the stairs up to the next level, because you can't "finish" the bottom level until the stairs are done! And I realized that the inner walls for the stairs would need to be painted before the whole section could be closed in with the wall to the dungeon......So here is a view from the Great Hall through the doors at one end. The right hand door is the one down the stairs to the kitchen and dungeons. The center door leads to the chapel. The left hand door will lead up stairs to the ladies Solar. When we get there that is!

This is a view of the rather complex stair construction with the inner walls and dungeon ceiling removed. You can also see the first attempt of mine at making a faux stone floor on the dungeon level. Nina says to use "polyfilla" - a substance not available here and the closest I could approximate was to use "Bondo". I debated with myself long and hard about the need for that level of realism on the floor....and eventually decided to try it. I'm very glad I did! The layer of realism is really good! More details later......not sure I have a closeup of that! Anyway, you can see the hidden back Postern stairs in the corner, and the back dungeon in this shot.

This shot shows the same thing from a different angle, with a better sense of the two floor levels. The above level is the Chapel, in the back corner will be the Monk's cell with the hidden trap door to the Postern stairs. The Chapel floor level is lower than the Great Hall - allowing for the ceiling in the Chapel to be higher.

Well, you can ALMOST see the scribed stone shapes in the floor! When it is painted they show up better.........






Yes, I did upload this photo twice......sorry...... you get to see this ceiling detail again......

Meanwhile, I was also beginning the bottom level room in the Guard Tower. This was to be the stables. After all, every Knight must have his horses, a castle kitchen must have its chickens and cows......so a stable was in order. Here I must say I have indulged another very old passion of mine.......toy horses! I LOVE horses. Next to dollhouses (which I had) horse stables were the thing I most wanted to make when I was little. So once I got started the dreams all came rushing back to me......Stalls all lined up in a row, mangers for hay, tack hanging on the walls, and of course, the necessary steeds in residence!

Here you can see the beginnings taking shape, including the vaulted ceiling because this is on the lowest level of a big old stone tower!

Oh, and of course, first Ken had to bring the horses in to test the space for size.............

The noble steed..........

And the gentle palfrey.......

Before you know it the stable walls and the vaulted ceiling have been given their coats of paint. The stall partitions and mangers have not yet been attached.......

Even though the doors are still not done, the horses are right at home in their new stables.

They still don't have their tie-ups in place, so I'm afraid they are making good use of their freedom while no one is looking........

There are still a great many little details that are not completed in these lowest level rooms that will take me a long time to accomplish. But they will come to me in time. I am not in a hurry. Because I still have more bottom level rooms to build.....and none of my ceilings are attached yet......so I'm not REALLY moving up to the next level just yet........

but this is where I will END for now!

Vaulted Ceilings from the Bottom Up!

The Next Step Is Simple

The next step was simple, or so I thought. The stairs were the obvious next project once the fireplaces had been roughed in. You may recall that I had never been happy with the stairs in the original arrangement. Don't get me wrong - they were very nice stairs and very well built by my Grandpa, but they got in the way of playing in the dollhouse! They slanted in a straight line from right to left going up across the open side of the hall room in the downstairs and in front of the two small rooms upstairs. They were positioned for ease of access to little people being MOVED up or down them, but playing in the rooms behind them was always awkward. And they had no railings. Because they were sometimes in the way they got wiggled loose pretty early on in our acquaintance. Then we could swing them up and down, like a drawbridge, sort of out of the way. This eventually caused them to simply come out altogether, and then they had to be kept track of, like the chimney which had also become detached. I wonder sometimes, whether somewhere in an attic or on the top shelf of an old closet there is a small pile of dollhouse parts.......and what someone who might find them would think........

So the Lovely Old Dollhouse had no stairs. And the big empty hallway looked like this:

This was an opportunity to start fresh and build the stairs just how they ought to be!

For starters, there would need to be a turn at a landing part way up so the stairs could fit along one side of the hall. To do this I would need to cut into the hall ceiling to make the new opening for the stairs at the top. And this in turn would make one of the small upstairs "rooms" into the upstairs hall landing instead. I liked that idea, as I had always thought the two little rooms were too small to be more than a bathroom, and only one of those was needed.

You must realize, dear readers, that I was still very new to this dollhouse re-building world. I had not yet gone to the internet to look anything up! There was a miniatures store in a nearby town and I knew there were kits for stairs, but I was fairly certain that a ready-built staircase would not easily fit the old house's dimensions. I was completely prepared to build the whole thing myself from scratch.......with the exception of the stair spindles perhaps. So I did.

I bought some very thin plywood with a nice smooth finish for the structure. And the treads are also made from the plywood. In retrospect, I maybe should have made them from solid wood stock so the plywood layers would not show. But I didn't. You can see the layers of the plywood on the ends of the stair treads.

Here is the framework roughed out and temporarily in place.

And here you can see it with the treads positioned in place.



And here's the second floor stairway roughed in - which had to take a slightly different position and required some fancy cantilevering to hold it up.

It was at about this point that I realized that BEFORE I fixed the stairs in place "permanently" I was going to need to finish ALL the details of the rooms BEHIND them! That meant completing the missing wainscoting panels and door trim in the hall, not to mention the front door itself! And the painting of said trim and paneling... and doorknobs..... and the windows of the upstairs hall, and the paneling....and the painting.... which meant deciding about colors and trim details. And it meant making the stairs "removable" for the time being. Maybe this wasn't so simple after all!

So I got to work on the missing wainscoting panels. Remember the box of dollhouse scale "lumber" that my brother had made for me all those years ago? The one that has moved with me for thirty five years and counting? I opened the box and found more pieces of planed pine wood in the correct dimensions to match the wainscoting I had built in my teen years! Eureka! What a feeling of profound satisfaction that gave me! The very same wood! So I carved it to look as much like the other panels as I could... ie. a bit rough and unrefined.

And for the door frames I decided to follow the inspiration of that book with the beautiful old photos of Vermont houses, albeit a bit crudely. I found some moulding trim in the lumber store that had a nice rope-like carving along the middle which I thought would make an elegant header for the doorways in the hall.

As for the paint, I had always loved the smokey blue color the hall was originally, and tried my best to match that color in a new paint. And rather than use the expected white paint for the trim work, I love to use a soft dove gray. It goes so well with the blue and has an old and moody feel about it. And this IS an old house, isn't it? Hmmm. That reminds me that I really haven't decided how modern I am planning to make this "Old" house! But no need to decide right now!

So here we have the hall with the new (and old) paneling and new door trim and paint.



And the side where the stairs will go.... with the removable stairs removed and only some of the paneling and trim in place. And the walls still the original blue........

And you can see the opening I cut in the ceiling for the stairway




I did make a trip to the nearby miniatures shop for the spindles for the stairway, and the newel posts because they are so superior to anything I could make myself. I have had to attach only some of them in order to keep the whole stairway removable while the rest of the work is done.


This is the upstairs stairway - the whole unit slides out! And you can see the second floor hall paneling under construction behind it......

And here is a view of both the stairways temporarily in place.

I decided against painting the stairways to match the hall trim after seeing several examples of unpainted wood staircases in the book of old Vermont houses. Not only from there, I also took inspiration from the beautiful walnut paneled staircase in George Washington's Mount Vernon. In the old days of this house's era, it was not yet fashionable to paint all the woodwork white. I have always prefered the look of the dark wood, so I decided to stain the stairs a dark walnut color.

Here you see the stairs temporarily fitted in place.
It remains to be seen how detailed I will get with the trim on the stairs and the under stairs closet. And the floor may need painting too. You can clearly see the "ghost" of where the stairs used to terminate... a savings of about two inches of space in the hall! And the stairs will have to remain temporarily in place at least until the new front door is built.....

The next step was going to be simple.

Or so I thought at first.