{Hello!: A Year Of Doors} February, again...

I know I already posted February's door, and I know I said I probably woudn't be doing the base/landscaping/hardscaping any time soon, but I did actually end up working on it here and there between other things over the past few days and it is completely finished now! (except for being installed into the display and the edges finished of course), so I thought I'd post it real quick before I move on and start working on either some of the stuff for May's door (since it is now May), or January's door.

I ended up finding a herringbone brick to use Wednesday evening and from there it all came together nicely:

I really wanted the herringbone because when laid the right way it vaguely looks like hearts, but is still something that would be a normal thing for someone to use at the entrance to their house, so is part of this particular theme, but also not specific to this theme.  Originally I had planned to have it all the way across like in this picture but I kind of thought it might not seem quite right so...

... I tried it with it just in front of the door area and I ended up deciding I liked that better.  Of course that left the other side of the base to do something with, but I'll get to that in a minute.

Because the brick was only going to be in front of the door area it needed to have a finished edge/border to it, which I was afraid was going to be really hard to achieve and get it to look good, but actually it was pretty easy.  I ended up just cutting individual bricks from extra of the herringbone I printed and gluing them one by one in a straight pattern around the edges and it worked! (I was afraid it would look too fakey doing it that way but it turned out pretty good.... if you pay too much attention you can see I didn't get my edges lined up quite right all the way back so the bricks end up getting a little smaller as towards the wall of the house, but it wasn't bad enough for me to be willing to do the whole thing over lol).  I also had originally planned for the herringbone to be regular red brick, but I ended up liking this kind of faded brick color better, especially with the door being red.  

Once I had the brick stoop/patio taken care of I had to figure out what to do with the rest of the front.  Garden area was the obvious, but since this is supposed to be February I had to figure out what if anything to have growing in it.  I didn't want to do regular shrubs or snow in this scene because I'm planning on January having shrubs on either side of the entrance and being snow dusted, and this door already had a lot of white so I didn't want to add more with snow.  After doing some looking around on good old Google and Pinterest for winter plant/garden ideas I decided that a winterberry bush would be perfect and to put it on the left of the garden area to bring a little of the red from the door area to the other side of the scene as well. (this is a dwarf variety, which does exist in real life, to fit the space better)  The rest of the bed I left bare (the owners of this house have flowers and stuff planted there in the spring/summer).  Unfortunately I didn't get any process pictures really, but I made the bush from two model scenery trees (that are a smaller scale obviously) that I pulled the green off of so that I was left with just the bare branches.  I then glue tiny no hole beads to the branches in various clusters. (the beads were actually purple because that's what I had, so I painted them red very carefully after their glue had dried).  I had cut a small section of a couple layers of the balsa wood the base is made of off so that the garden bed would sit slightly lower than the bricks.  After gluing the finished bush into the balsa, I did the mulch the same way I did for my teacup garden party, I painted the base dark brown then spread a layer of glue and covered it with black large grain decorative sand from Dollar Tree.  I didn't worry about it having perfect coverage though as by February most garden's mulch has been there since spring and isn't in it's prime anymore. 

Checking how it all looks with the house before I move on to the next step

So, next step was to paint the mulch because while the color of the black actually probably would have been okay for this one it does have some sparkles in it so it just doesn't look quite right so I painted it the dark brown

But then because that looked too fresh I ended up doing quite a few layers of fading/aging on it until I was happy with it (I actually started with making it more faded looking but ended up then putting a little more brown back over that because it needed a little more color than the really faded version had I thought)

I also mixed a color to be as close as I could get it to the color of the bricks to paint the edges of that section.  It may end up being covered with a trim piece when I install it into the display, but just in case I want all the exposed edges finished.  I also had a tiny bit where the garden and the bricks meet that you could still see the bare wood so it needed the color to make it blend in properly

And here it is all together.  I'm quite happy with how it turned out

And while I was taking picture anyway here's all three of them. (granted March doesn't have it's doormat and April doesn't have it's doormat or the topiary or bunny statue and still needs its patio completely done.... Which I might actually do that real quick today because it just need to be glued to a base lol)