We've talked about the initial plan, and some basic construction, so now let's move onto what happens when an idea gets in my head and I just can't ignore it.
Here's where we left off:
I couldn't help but think the rooms were turning out much smaller than I'd anticipated. I knew they weren't going to be huge, but I'd thought I'd have enough room to play around with. I was wrong.
It was too late to do anything to the living room, my earlier plan of plastering the walls had worked too well. Taking that down now would be a huge mess and probably result in some pretty serious damage. I needed to rethink.
Thinking sounded really dull though, so what I did instead was rip off the walls on the dining room side and just hope for the best.
I won't lie, I was afraid.
The sensible thing to do here would have been to scrap those three floor pieces and build new ones that were a more suitable size, but I really wanted to try and minimise the amount of waste I had, so I worked with it.
Again, I didn't really take any photos of the process, but I basically made two more panels that were half the size of the existing ones and glued them to the side. I made sure the plywood was running across the joins where possible to add some stability and prevent it from breaking apart.
It's not the best solution because there is weakness still, it would be stronger if the floors were made of one continuous piece of strip wood rather than several pieces relying on glue. I also made a lot of mistakes with measuring so had to bodge things together. I was reasonably confident that once the other supports were in and the walls went up, it would add a lot more rigidity to the whole structure.
It isn't perfect, and just comes down to learning on the go, but I gained roughly 3 inches of space in each room (which is 3 feet in 1/12 scale) and it really made them more functional. It did mean that the living room and dining room swapped sides, but I'm ok with that.
After that whole drama, I decided to move onto another big piece of the puzzle, the roof!
The house was big at this point, and already heavy with only half the framing done, so I knew the roof needed to be a separate piece. This is actually quite common with large dollhouses, they tend to be modular, which makes it more practical to move them around. You might also have noticed that I'm working in a room with sloped ceilings, my house is tiny and there's only so much space I have to play with. I needed to be realistic about what I could feasibly do in my little attic sweatshop.
The Addams' roof is a mansard roof with dormer window, and a tall tower running through it. I was really intimidated at the thought of working out these complex angles, but it was actually surprisingly easy.
This was just a test for spacing, but all I did was take a sheet of A4 plywood, measure two inches in along one of the long sides and then draw a diagonal line from that point to the opposite side
Enjoy my beautiful rendering of what that looked like.
Then, to add the dormers, I cut out whatever shape I wanted to the front of the dormer to be, and used my angled off-cuts to fill in the gap.
The tower is a just a square built from stripwood like the rest of the house, and again I'm basing all these sizes on sheets of A4 plywood. The sloped walls are a sheet on its side, and the tower is a vertical sheet on all 4 walls.
I used more plywood and stripwood to build a solid floor which matches the footprint of the main house, and then used yet more stripwood around the edge as a brace to support the sloped roof. When I decorate the exterior, I'll put a trim around the top edge of the main house which will hide the join between the two pieces. I'll be the first to point out that nothing is very level or square, so there are gaps.
I didn't really take any photos of the inside of the roof section before I'd made a lot of progress on it, but the plan for the attic is Fester's room above Gomez & Morticia, and Wednesday & Pugsley sharing a room over the office. The top room of the tower is as yet undecided, but I'm leaning towards making it a nursery for Pubert!
More framing went up, and you can see the windows I've bought for the front of the house. The living room and bedroom also have french doors which will open into/onto the conservatory! One of the elements from the film I loved was the terrace Gomez and Morticia escape to so I really wanted to incorporate this. I'm also going to add a final level to the tower, the peaked roof, but I'm now hitting the height limit on my workspace so I need to figure out a proper home for the thing. Considering moving house because my dollhouse is too big, because that's sane.
That's all for now, thank you for reading! Next up is the stairs, which was a whole process, so look forward to seeing my struggle with that!