Hall, stairs and landing(s)

The toughest decorating job in any house is papering and painting the hall, stairs and landings, so in the case of Bon Marché, I'm glad to get it out of the way early. I don't have any choice to be honest because all three staircases run sideways up the back wall and I can't progress until they are in position and the wallpaper must go on first!

As I mentioned in my last post (Measure twice . . . 2 April), the wallpaper design was printed from a CD. Inkjet inks are water soluble so I couldn't use ordinary wallpaper paste and I'm having to trust to spray mounting the A4 paper directly onto the MDF and smoothing it down firmly with a clean soft cloth (synthetic fleece is ideal). With the paper held top and bottom by mouldings and skirting boards not to mention the stairs themselves, I'm hoping things should stick OK. But if any peeling does occur, the old shop/house is not meant to be in perfect repair and it won't really matter!

This shows the wallpaper following the line of the first flight of stairs. The area behind the stairs is Charlie Brennan's kitchenette at the back of the shop, and here I'm also trying out the position of the sink and draining board. Above the sink there'll be a dummy window. I might also install a false door down to the (imaginary) cellar if space allows.


The caboodle theme is sculptural this time. 

Remember that Charlie's shop specialized in antiques and curios before the war, which accounts for anything and everything gathered together here, from a statue of the Hindu god Vishnu, a suit of armour, the figurehead from the good ship Centurion and the gilded Virgin and Child from a baroque crib, to various other bits and pieces (probably destined to stand gathering moss out in Frankie's yard if there's no room indoors).

charliechas

Measure twice . . .

Our clocks have just gone forward one hour for British Summer Time but that signifies nothing this year, we are still waking to frosty rooftops and a cutting east wind that won't drop. However, when I might otherwise have been outside gardening, I've stayed in the warm working on the shop/house Bon Marché.

After deciding to swap and relocate the internal walls between Floors 2 and 3 (Having a bash, 14 March 2013) I've pencilled all the new positions on Floor 2 - several times over as it happened, because I was forced to pin my vague visualizations down to physical reality and precise measurements! 
At the bottom of the second flight of stairs, I've created a concealed space for the lighting switchboard, the SWP power controller, (see Kensington Christmas Festival, 29 November 2012) which I shall mount on the back of the dummy door to the living room.

The dummy door has no hinges, instead it will lift out completely for access to wiring and switches, via the narrow opening panel on the left of the house. A hole drilled in the rear wall will allow the jack plug to feed through from the regulated dc power supply. As you can see, this particular board has a convenient socket for the jack, which saves any more faffing about with connecting wires - hooray.

Two tiny holes drilled in the centre of Floor 2 mark the positions of my first ceiling lights, in the shop area below. These are the elegant double-armed models bought from Ray Storey last November. And I've papered the shop ceiling as well, using a remnant of Lincrusta from our own RL decorating. 

After threading them through to the floor above, each pair of wires is firmly taped in position, ready for connection to the board. I think I am slowly becoming a real electrican!

The lights fit neatly against the ceiling. The carcase lies on its side as I work on it, but when it's turned upright, the chain switches will of course hang vertically. 

I've always found the use of full-scale wallpapers quite attractive when looking into antique dolls houses, and I'm keen to try the effect in my own. I think of it as the Picasso trick because it plays ambiguously with proportions, space and distance.

I found a book and CD of fabric designs in a museum shop and printed enough copies of this late-Victorian iris pattern to cover the staircase wall. Its large scale will be scarcely visible except through balusters and open doorways so we shall only get occasional glimpses. 

The caboodle this time is a wooden dresser destined for the kitchen next to the living room on Floor 2. It's a much-altered ebay purchase with the varnish sanded off and ball feet removed so the cupboard is flush to the floor. The shelf sides were cut back to give a larger work surface and the door and drawer handles replaced by white 'china' knobs - actually map pins, glued in with the points safely snipped off inside. When I saw how nice the plain wood looked I abandoned the idea of shabby painting the dresser. Instead I'll use a dab of shoe polish to match the kitchen table top. 

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charliechas

A post about a beam

This week I finally decided to add rafters and a ridge beam to the loft space.

This is how the sloping roof interior was left after the initial paint job. Since then, I've built a water tank and put together a collection of old toys, and there's a hidden box of letters yet to come. Now that the loft has become more interesting, I realize the background should be more detailed too.

So I took a number of flat wooden strips 7 mm [1/4 in] wide, (the same as I used for the floor joists) and dirtied them down with dilute grey watercolour paint. I did the same with a length of square section wood for the ridge beam. 

I cut the flat strips into lots of short pieces and stuck them with PVA onto the dark painted areas in pairs at regular intervals, cleaning off the excess glue as I went.

Here's a view inside the apex at this stage, already far more realistic (compare it with Not much room at the top, 19 December 2012).

Working on the half of the roof that will be permanently attached to the rear wall, I fitted the ridge beam into the space allowed at the top ends of the rafters, then I filled in the hinges with shorter pieces cut to size. The loft floor will cover the lower ends and neaten the paint line. The gable ends were left clear so that the hinged section will open and close OK. 

And now I shall reward myself by making up the box of secret letters! 

charliechas

Having another bash

Wrapping tape around the waist of Bon Marché hints at some serious work ahead, and it is. For a start, it takes two people to assemble the main panels enclosing the ground floor. They are pretty heavy and about a metre in height - we have the makings of a Laurel and Hardy episode until everything is secured. A tolerant family member or friend is absolutely essential at such times!

Already sanded and primed, the largest sections are checked against one another. The rear wall of Bon Marché is MDF and the sides and front (which I've already covered) are of plywood. Because of their different manufacture, MDF and ply are not guaranteed to remain dimensionally stable in relation to each other, something I discovered as we got on to the next stage.

After laying the back and right-hand wall panels horizontally, at right-angles to each other, we began to prepare the floor sections for final fitting and gluing (but not actually gluing because the decorating is still to be done). 

Like the rear wall, the floors are cut from MDF and their tabs fitted the slots on the back without any difficulty. However, the slots in the plywood side were too narrow - only by something less than 0.5 mm - yet just enough to resist the necessary snug fit. The plywood had shrunk while the MDF had not, but it could be remedied by shaving the ply down one side of each slot with a sharp Stanley knife (an ordinary craft knife or scalpel blade would not be strong enough).

In the end, all the floors were pressed firmly in place and squared up.

Keeping the carcase on its back, I experimented again with swapping interior walls between Floors 2 and 3 (SeeThink electric, 19 October 2012). Fortunately the height of the rooms is the same on both floors.The result of the swap is a full-depth living room on Floor 2, visible through the side opening in the left-hand wall (see first photo). And each bedroom on Floor 3 gets its own door. Win-win! 

First, I took the walls from Floor 3 to Floor 2 where I plan to have a kitchen next to the living room. The smaller room was too narrow and I have moved the party wall a little over to the left so that the kitchen is now big enough for Charlie and Frankie to eat in, as well as cook. It will also be separated from the stairs and landing by a half-glazed partition,  a very common solution in those days to making extra room space in old houses.

And this is the living room viewed from the side. I'll block up the old connecting doorway with a chimney breast and fireplace. The new door onto the landing gives access round from the kitchen and also up the next flight of stairs to the bedrooms. 

Up on Floor 3 I had the same problem with the smaller room being too narrow (beds take up a surprisingly  large area, I find). So here too, I've moved the party wall and made enough space for a wardrobe.

This shot shows I've kept the dividing walls in a vertical line. By the way I hope you'll excuse the rather crooked, fuzzy photos, they were taken sans tripod from the top of a small step ladder. The house was lying on its back and the interior walls were propped up on Lego bricks. It was an all-round balancing trick!

Here's some 'new' vintage caboodle to finish with:

I'm so pleased with the F.G.T & Sons  gas fire, I've been chasing one for ages and to get the pale blue version is a real bonus. This is ideal for the lodger's room, now I'll have to make a coin-in-the-slot meter to go with it. The bread bin and slop pail aren't vintage, they're just awaiting 'the treatment'. 

charliechas

Oh, what a tangled web . . .

The box of toys has finally been assembled for the loft, including the mini baby doll I had mislaid earlier. Rather than blow dust over the arrangement, I wanted to try the cobwebbed effect. It seemed logical to use genuine spiders' webs and so I set out for a prime source - the festoons hanging inside the windows of our garden shed. 

I made a loop of wire and harvested what I thought would be enough, keeping a wary eye open for any spidery movements. Not that I'm particularly scared of them but I am very allergic to being bitten (don't let anyone tell you we have no venomous spiders in the UK, I was sensitized by a harmless-looking little number that crawled out of a bag of grapes).

The initial problem was carrying the web material back up to the house in a keen easterly wind. Of course, it promptly wrapped itself around the wire. Once indoors I had to tease the stuff apart  in order to spread it over the toys. I was surprised it didn't disintegrate, quite the contrary, it's really tough and has a lot of stretchability. 

The snag is that web silk is designed to stick to any living thing that isn't a spider, so half of it kept coming away with my fingers. And it was so strong that I found I couldn't break off the unwanted bits without dislodging the toys. It was definitely one of those frustrating times when you think 'only a miniaturist would even contemplate this!'

So here's the result. It's only an experiment, I could try teased-out cotton wool instead. Or perhaps I'll just leave the toybox down in the shed for a few weeks and let the spiders deal with it all by themselves.

charliechas