Last time I talked about the inspiration behind the house and how the basic frame came together. Today we're continuing on with construction. I didn't really take that many photos of the process to be honest, and I've jumped about all over when building this thing, so it's not the most cohesive thing to write about, but hopefully you'll get the idea.
Here's where we left off. As well as buying that door, I'd also bought some windows, which I used to measure out the spacing for the supports.
In a real house, a window opening has king studs along the side, a sill plate and a header held up by trim plates. I tried to keep this in mind when building the walls in miniature.
You can see here around the window openings, I have the king studs, sills and headers around the window opening. This wall would then be covered with another layer of plywood from the inside, giving me thick, strong, but reasonably lightweight walls. Also, there would be way more support in a real wall, so please don't use this as a guide or sue me when your real house falls down.
I did this in stages around the house, partly to break things up, and also just because I ran out of sticks and had to wait on delivery.
Here I've got spacing worked out for the dining room windows, and the internal door frames roughed in. The living room in the back has a transom window framed out as well. This will eventually have a stained glass panel in it to add some interest.
I knew I wanted a bay window off the living room, so I turned my attention to that next.
I built this using the same framing method as the rest of the house, with the upright studs cut at an angle to hold the roof in place. This sounds like it required a lot of careful measuring and planning, but honestly I just held things in in place and eyeballed where it looked right.
After I'd attached this, I really started to hate how square it was. In what would become a continuing theme, I ripped it off and hacked away at it.
Much better. If I were to do this again I'd probably make the bay smaller and more angled as it's still a bit blocky for my liking, but I really don't feel like redoing it. Eventually this will be heavily decorated with leaded windows and a cushioned seat, but that's a job for another time.
More internal sheathing went up, you can see here what I meant by another layer of plywood covering all the studs. And yes, that is a lot of clamps.
With the walls sheathed, it was really starting to look like something. I used foamcore instead of plywood on that back wall just because measuring and cutting the wood was getting tedious, and really doing a number on my fingers.
At this point the house was becoming really quite strong, but I was still worried about it potentially pulling apart.
After a conversation with my lovely friend Neel about the Titanic breaking in half, I decided to coat the walls in filler, my thought process being this would encase all the joins, add another layer of strength, and give me a cool surface to paint when it came time to decorate the interiors.
Still got those windows in place, and I've started staining the floors and painting the door. I'm not worried about the tops and bottoms being neat, because they will be covered with trim anyway (fun architectural fact, that was the original purpose of skirting boards and cornice)
So here's where we are. Next time I'll talk about how I stayed up until 4am undoing a good chunk of progress to gain 3 inches of space, but until then, enjoy this artsy shot I took with my phone and an e-cig.
Thanks for reading!
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