Here's a reminder of where I was when I put it away in late 2018:
The last thing I had attempted to work on had been the windows for the upper floor and they just were not working out using the materials I was trying to use and I think that's part of the reason I set it aside for "a while". I wanted diamond pane glass for the large upper story windows, and originally I was trying to use this black mesh, I guess you would call it ribbon, but it just was not perfectly squared and then when I would try to square it up and glue it to the plastic sheeting I use as glass it wouldn't stay right, and then you could see the glue, but then I kind of thought maybe I'd try actually filling the openings with glue and have it look like older glass, but at that point I was so frustrated with it and wanted to get my living room (where I was working on it at the time) straightened up that I put it away and of course that brings us to now. In the meantime, while I was in the clay aisle at hobby lobby one day, sometime last year, I found what is essentially tiny chicken wire that is meant to be used to make bases/forms for clay sculpting but I decided that it would make much easier windows for me. At that point I had still been planning on using glue to fill the openings and serve as the glass, but the first thing I had to do, when I got back to working on it, was spray paint it matte black
After test fitting that I wasn't sure I liked how small the diamonds were.... they were an okay size in scale if you measure them (they would have been about 6 inch panes), but I felt like a window this size should have bigger panes, so I decided to try cutting some of the pieces out to make bigger diamonds. I ended up deciding I liked this better, and then spent about half an hour cutting sections out of the windows. My only problem with this is that I apparently wasn't keeping close enough track of what I was supposed to be cutting because on both windows I have a section where I cut the wrong pieces off, but I decided that I would rather just go with that than do the whole thing over again. Lol. (You'll see the boo boos in the finished window pictures). I also decided at this point that I wasn't going to actually put any sort of glass in these windows, with it only being small sections I think it's fine to just pretend they have glass at this scale...
I thought my next step was to glue the frame pieces around the edges of the window mesh and then glue it all onto the building as one unit, but that didn't really work well
So I decided it would be best to lay the mesh in place over the opening and glue the trim to it and the building at the same time.... which ended up giving me way more trouble than it should have (someone please remind be to stop. doing. buildings. with. curved. walls. lol), and I finally broke down and did the miniatures no-no and used hot glue..... for this though it really ended up being the best option, since I use a high temp glue gun it gave me enough workable time but then set right away to hold the bent pieces in place.
The next thing I worked on was actually the window display for the first floor window. I knew that I would need to have that done before installing the window so that I could access it easier to place stuff just right. (I also ended up actually attaching part of it to the plastic sheet that was the glass, but I didn't know I was going to do that at first). The window display theme is "Go on an adventure..... in the pages of a book" so the display is a large open book base (made from carved foam and paper) with a sailing ship and a rabbit hole/hobbit hole cut out of the book "pages" and standing up and books placed on display in and around them. (From left to right the books are, Gulliver's Travels, Treasure Island, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Around the World In 80 Days, and The Hobbit.... a couple of the covers I think you can kind of tell at least in the pictures what book it is, but not really all of them with them printed this tiny lol). The "in the pages of a book" banner is sitting in front of the book display, and the "Go on an adventure" banner it hanging from the window opening. The Around The World in 80 Days hot air balloon is actually just glued to the window itself.
So once that was done I took the base part of the display back out so that I could install the floor. I had previously made the floor on a piece of cardstock cut to size, but it was a little warped in places and I was afraid it wouldn't lay flat and adhere properly unless it was weighted down until the glue was dry and of course this isn't a very big building to get a weight into, much less one that would distribute the pressure evenly over the entire surface, so I ended up piling several bags of craft sand into the building on top of the floor and let that sit until the glue was dry, and that worked really well. I really love the look of the floor, even more so now that it's installed into the building.
My next project was the door. I really really wanted the logo that I designed for the bookstore on the door, but I wanted it printed on the door, not me trying to trace it with paint or something and it looking like a hot mess. I tried transferring the image with packing tape, which Ive seen done to make labels for jars and such, but it was not going to work for this, so then I was looking at the plastic sheets I use and they are 8.5x11 and I thought: hey maybe they are that size for a reason, let me try running it through my printer and printing the image directly onto it. So I printed a couple copies of the logo (some of them were other sizes I had tried out or partially finished ones, I only needed one good one, but I wanted some to test out before working with the good one) praying the whole time that it didn't somehow mess up my printer. But it printed fine and looked great. The next question was would the ink dry/set on the surface, so I left it alone for a while and then came back and tested one of them and it smeared right away. So, my plan for if that happened was to try spray clear gloss top coat over it and see what happened. Well that worked perfectly on my test piece. (My final one actually has a lot more little tiny air bubble dots in in, probably because I think I sprayed the sealer on too thick the second time, so for the future, light coats and just do two if necessary), but overall it was still the better looking one, because it was the better version of the logo and didn't have any stray fibers under the top coat. lol. And I freaking love how it turned out, and was so easy once I figured out the exact process, so I will definitely be using this technique again anytime I need logos or anything printed on "glass" for a miniature project!
Once the door was done I did the inside trim for the first story window and put the display back in place.
I added a little detail to the top of the building, that probably most people won't even see or notice, but it was something really simple and I think just really sells the whole, the building is books thing (can you spot what it is? hint: look at the top of the spines)
And then I added just one more bit of trim over the door on the outside of the building (which i liked it being white when I first put it on, but now I'm not sure if I might paint it the color of the rest of the trim, but I'll wait a while and see how I feel about it after looking at it for a longer period of time)
Which means the building/structure itself is finished now as well as all of the outside trim and the inside trim on the first floor, and I have moved on to working on the furnishings/stocking the shop. The first thing I needed to do was dry fit the second floor and the stairs, but, they won't be going in until at least the stuff deeper toward the front of the shop is in place on the first floor. just to make sure I have enough room to actually get that stuff in since it's a narrow store.
Once I had a general idea of the ceiling height and about where the stairs will be I did a preliminary floor plan and started to build the wall of bookshelves that will be in the long blank wall. After building them to the height I thought I wanted though, I felt like they needed to be a little taller so I added another row of shelves (which makes them 7ft tall in scale height). The top row of shelves ended up getting constructed differently than the rest of it, but once it was painted up that wasn't too noticeable and I'm sure will be even less so once they shelves are filled with books.
Speaking of filling the shelves with books, I have started working on that as well, I had made what I thought was a good chunk of books back in 2018 for this but then decided to use some of them for a library in a book shaped gift card holder as a Christmas present for one of my friends that year and realized that it was going to take quite a few more books than I thought to fully stock the bookstore. I did think about just printing rows of book spines and gluing them to strips of wood to put in the shelves, but knowing how good it looked with individual books I just couldn't bring myself to do it after doing a sample set. So I used what I had left from my original batch to start filling this bookcase, partly because I wanted for it to start looking like a real shop and partly to get a better idea of how many books I would really need. And I love the books on the shelves and it really makes it start feeling like a store to me when I set the unit in place in the building to see how it would look. (I might add another section to the length of the bookcase too, I had originally planned for one more section on the bookcase, but then I kind of thought of a slight change I might want to make to the floor plan so I'm going to hold off on the last section until I figure that out for sure.
So that's as far as I've gotten on it so far, but honestly having the outside done and the inside ready to start putting furnishings and stuff on the first floor really makes it seem to me like I've moved forward leaps and bounds with this project. My next step with it will be mainly making books, and then of course we will be in June soon here and I want to get June's door for my year of doors project done early in the month, since it looks like I will be going back to babysitting probably by the middle of the month, so I will probably be posting that door before I end up posting any progress with the bookstore.
I do also have a little announcement though..... I decided to start a Facebook page to go along with the blog! I like the idea of having that as a companion to the blog that I can easily post a picture here and there of what I am working on right at that moment, and progress pictures and stuff, and I'm thinking that it will give me the flexibility to be able to more easily share more and different types of content as well (like I'm thinking maybe videos occasionally and stuff like that) and I will most likely have to Facebook exclusive content as well, so if you haven't already hop on over to Facebook and like and follow my Joanna's Dollhouse Diaries page so you don't miss out on anything!
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