My first step was to mask off the areas around the trim I planned to paint with the accent color, to (theoretically) protect what I’d already painted. I went through a lot of tape. Then I painted the accent trim with a couple of coats of Glidden’s “slate gray,” leftover from my Rosedale.

I really made an effort to stay inside the lines…

From a distance, it looks great!

Up close, not so much. I’m not used to painting trim that’s already attached to the house and don’t have the patience to try to make this perfect. So, I’m going to cover up the “seams” where two colors meet with pieces of crown molding and basswood. That means more fiddly trim painting, which I hate, but it’ll look much cleaner in the end. I bought it all today and will (presumably) be working on it this coming week.

Next I turned my attention to the eaves. After seeing photos of another Hillside Victorian, I decided to copycat its decorative eaves. This is embossed trim and I’m not sure how well the design will show through when it’s painted. Luckily I have some leftover pieces to experiment with before I commit. I want to paint them white but if that doesn’t work out I could use colored stain.

To get the fit just right on the small piece, I made a template out of a piece of paper and folded it where it met the shingles.

I used this as a guide for cutting the bottom of the trim piece, which needed to be a little crooked for a snug fit.

And voila! I think it looks pretty sweet!

Except… I forgot about the window. I bought this Victorian window to match the rest of them and already enlarged the hole to fit it, so there’s no going back. I see two options: shim the window so it sticks out over the trim, or cut the trim to fit around the pediment using a coping saw. I don’t trust myself to do a good job of the latter, so shims are probably the answer.

I also bought some resin appliques to dress up the white panels. I really liked these, but they’re a bit too tall for the lower panels (and the dollhouse store only had four, anyway). So these will go along the top white section, over the bay window and the porch.

And on the lower parts of the bays, I’ll use these round ones. I’m thinking the appliques will be a different accent color—either red or gold. Haven’t decided yet.

Finally, I’m going back and forth about what to do with the hidden room downstairs. My original plan was to leave it open for easy viewing and access, but I started thinking about adding a hinged wall like the house was supposed to have in the first place. I ruined the old piece when I liberated the room, so Geoff made me a new one. Perfect fit!

I’m not exactly sure how to hinge this without having a gap or siding weirdness where the two pieces meet. Still mulling it over. Today I got the idea to turn this piece into a faux garage door, something like this or this that doesn’t even really look like a garage door, and then have the piece be easily removable so you can see inside to the laundry room. (I wouldn’t actually add a garage, it would just be a way to have the removable piece look like it belongs, even without siding.)

But with the 3-inch foundation, of course there could never be a garage door at that level, and adding a little deck might call attention to the fact that there’s a fake garage door in a spot where there couldn’t possibly be a garage. Bright ideas, anyone?

After a fairly lengthy hiatus (my fault, not theirs), Adventure Gamers has posted the fifth installment of my Eye on iPhone article series. I continue to be baffled by the number of mischaracterized non-adventures cluttering the App Store’s adventure section and this is my small attempt to make it right. (Which, much like adventure games themselves, goes largely unnoticed…)

Self deprecation aside, there are some impressive games in the mix this time, including the first episode of Telltale’s Law & Order: Legacies (Lennie Brisco lives!), the recently ported Touch Detective (which originally underwhelmed me on Nintendo DS but has somehow gotten better with age), and the very creepy Ellie – Help Me Out… Please.

You should totally go read it.

For Christmas, Rosy bought me and Geoff a Wisdom Panel Insights DNA test… using my credit card. It cost $65 and involved swabbing her cheek to get a sample (she loved that part), sending the sample off to a lab, and waiting three weeks for the results. And those results are in! Drum roll please…

A Chihuahua mixed with an English Springer Spaniel? Seriously?! I call shenanigans. This dog has to have at least a smidgen of Italian Greyhound in her.

The report goes on to identify the five “next best breed matches” that were detected in her DNA, which could have contributed to the mixed breed grandparent.

Out of those, the Wirehaired Pointing Griffon seems most similar to her body shape, though she does have a few “long face” expressions that remind me a lot of a Dachshund.

Before getting this DNA test, I’d read online that they’re not accurate. It was really an impulse buy that we did for fun. (Damn you, Humane Society, for putting these right next to the register a week before Christmas!) And now that we “know” what she is, I kind of don’t care. Rosy will always be a Greyhuahua to me. But that’s the last time I lend her my credit card…

I bought my Hillside Victorian off Craigslist in March 2010 for $150. The couple I bought it from had purchased it a few years earlier from Shellie’s Mini Mania in San Carlos, CA. It was already assembled; they added the siding and shingles. According to the instructions that came with it, the house is signed and numbered (I haven’t found a signature or number on mine, though) and the manufacturer, MiniWright, was based in Simi, California.

After I posted about it on the Greenleaf forum, another member found the house in a 1979 miniatures catalog. Here’s the description:

Heirloom quality slant bay home features: authentic detailing, unique second floor, entry with 3″ base and side street stairs for hillside effect. Shingled, Queen Anne gabled roof; doublehung window treatment. The suggested floor plan defined by removable partitions includes: lower level maids’ quarters, bathroom. hallway, kitchen, and wine cellar/pantry. Main level includes: living and dining rooms (12″ ceilings). Third floor: spacious bedrooms.

The house is in the 2nd edition of the Miniatures Catalog copyright 1979 and the house sold for $450 and came unassembled.

She also sent me a couple of pictures out of the Miniatures Catalog 3rd edition, which didn’t include a price, but did include a bonus Country Victorian that looks very similar.

For a long time, that’s all I knew. Someone posted a comment on my blog that she had a MiniWright Mercantile, but when I emailed for more info I didn’t get a response. Then, in December 2011, a woman named Sheree got in touch to let me know that she’d recently bought a Hillside Victorian dollhouse just like mine but a bit farther along, also off Craigslist. Today she sent me a bunch of pictures and said I could post them.

The windows are a different style than mine, but they also look like after-market (Houseworks) windows, which makes me think the house didn’t come with its own windows. It’s missing the curved trim below the porch roof and some of the bay trim that my house has, but that might have been left off by the builder for aesthetic reasons.

The railings and widow’s walk look just like mine, so I guess these came included. Her house is missing the foundation portion of the stairs but I’m pretty sure those were included with the kit, since mine are made from the same pressboard material as the foundation itself.

On this side wall, Sheree has a window where I have a French door. That’s not too surprising, since my French door is pretty obviously an “upgrade.”

I was surprised to see a bay window here. My house has a large window on this side as well, and I thought the hole might have been enlarged from two smaller windows. But maybe the bay window is standard?

I absolutely love the stonework on this side of the house, it makes it look like the house is set into a hill. Of course, it covers up the wine cellar that I worked so hard to free from mine, but it sure looks pretty. (She still has access to that little room through an interior doorway.)

I also love how these gables are finished. Those aren’t fishscale shingles, but a circle pattern, I’m not sure what the material is. I’ll probably leave mine sided since the siding was already on there when I got the house, but I might add trim on the sides of the gables like this, I think it looks really nice.

The interior looks basically like mine so I won’t post the pictures here, with the exception of this one since it shows the interior stairway I don’t have. The 90-degree turn at the bottom of the stairs doesn’t look like it does on my instructions (which you can barely see in the first photo at the top of this blog), but it is consistent with the diagrams in my instructions.

The small partition with the doorway at the bottom of that last picture is supposed to go in the small part of the L-shaped groove, with a larger partition in the larger part. I don’t know why anyone would want to do that and block the view into the room, but that’s how the picture with my instructions shows it.

So that’s everything I know about this eclectic house… but I’d love to know more! At some point I’ll pull out my oldest Nutshell News magazines from the early 1980s and comb through them to see if it appears at all. In the meantime, I’ll keep rehabbing mine, and if you have this dollhouse or know anything more about its history, please contact me!

I’m using light blue paint that I’ve had for several years, and it was very thick when I first opened it, as if a lot of the water had evaporated since the last time I used it. Might not have been fully sealed. Geoff helped out, first stirring it with his drill attachment, then adding water until the consistency was closer to how paint should be.

The other thing I did (err, I mean the other thing Geoff did) was enlarge the small window hole on the third floor. I bought a small Victorian window to go in there and it was about half an inch too big.

With a die cut or laser cut house, I’d use a craft knife. For this cabinet grade plywood, we had to bring out the power tools. Sawzall to the rescue!

And here’s how it looks (along with the one other window I’ve painted so far).

Having decided I’m definitely not going to add the garage, the first thing I did today was remove the siding at the bottom of that side of the house so I could replace it. When liberating the little room, if I had approached it differently and scored the siding right at the edge of the room, this wouldn’t have been necessary. But thinking I’d be adding the garage and this would become an interior wall, I removed a few inches too much. Joining up two pieces of siding looks bad so I decided to take it all off and redo it.

These pieces were glued better than the ones I took off yesterday and I ended up pulling off some of the outer layer of plywood along with them.

Next I cut and glued on new pieces. Luckily I had just enough siding left over from the Westville to cover this area. Unluckily, it’s much harder to glue siding onto a house that can’t be turned onto its side (damn you, gravity!) After a bit of comedy I managed to get the pieces held in place. I also fixed a couple of loose spots higher up on the wall.

With that out of the way, I walked around the house looking for cracked siding and used watered down wood filler to clean up the cracks. Some of these were there when I started and some I caused yesterday trying to fix the siding that was loose. I’m hoping this will make them less visible (or, better yet, invisible!) once the paint is on.

Pre wood filler

Post wood filler

Before starting any painting, I vacuumed the house with Geoff’s shop vac. This was the squirmiest part of the day, because I’d noticed a pile of little brown somethings through the attic window, tucked into a little alcove that’s impossible to see into from the open part of the house. My dollhouse workshop is attached to the garage and we’ve had a mouse or two in there over the years… they’ve never caused damage, thankfully, but when I saw that pile of little brown somethings through the window I was convinced it was a mountain of mouse poop. (Which, admittedly, would be weird… what mouse poops in a designated area, enough times for it to pile up?) Totally grossed out by the idea of it, I chose not to memorialize this with a photo.

I was hoping I could just stick the shop vac through the window, using one of the attachments, to suck up whatever it was and never have to touch it. But of course the angle was too awkward. I ended up putting on a glove, reaching through the window, and flicking the little brown somethings out of the alcove and into the attic room where the vacuum would reach them (going “ew, ew, ew!” the whole time). And what do you know, it wasn’t a mountain of mouse poop, but a stash of little black seeds that the mouse had presumably stored there for the winter. (Aw, how cute. Not.) Into the shop vac they went.

With that unpleasant / ridiculous task out of the way, I started painting trim. I thought it would be a quick task and I could then move onto the house itself. Instead, it took the rest of the afternoon. (Well, not the entire afternoon, but I had exceeded my patience limit by that point.) I am really not used to working on such a big house! For the higher-up stuff I had to stand on a chair and twist into all sorts of precarious positions. Who needs yoga?!

I mostly used a foam brush, patting the wet paint with the edge of it to get rid of brush strokes (a technique I learned in the classes I took from The Guys from Texas). I didn’t bother masking the walls, thinking it’ll be easy enough to paint over any stray white paint with the blue I’m using for the house. (When I paint the house I will mask off the trim, though!)

The railing spindles were tough to paint, particularly the backs, as were the back sides of this curved panel and the porch roof behind it. I did the best I could to get the visible areas and might have to call it good enough. I’m definitely not looking forward to painting the siding in here—it’s a tight space and is very hard to get a brush in there. (With neat results, anyway.)

I think I have all of the railing pieces that go with this staircase, but they weren’t all attached when I got the house. I’m going to wait to deal with them until later. Also I’m planning to do a second coat of white paint since the coverage isn’t so great. (Oh goodie, more hours of paint yoga in my future!)

An interesting thing about this house—which according to old mini catalogs sold for $450 in 1979—is that the trim we take for granted now was all handmade. The newel posts are blocks of wood with globes glued on top, the spindles are simple dowels, and these crown molding-like pieces remind me of something you’d buy at Home Depot for a real house. Notice they don’t quite meet up at the corners. I’m telling myself that’s part of the charm.

In the end some of what I painted white today will be the dark blue accent color (the crown molding-like pieces, parts of the finials, maybe the railings). Knowing I’d probably need two coats of white, I figured I’d start by painting all the trim white, then mask it off and paint the house, then touch up the trim and add the blue once I can see how it looks with the light blue siding. I may have made extra work for myself though.

The first step was pulling it out of my relatively small workshop, where it’s been sitting on a wheeled dolly leftover from Geoff’s airplane building days, and into the garage where I would actually have some space to work on it. I’m not sure how long Geoff will tolerate it staying in the garage so I have to move quickly!

A lot of the siding is coming up at the edges, so fixing that is one of the first orders of business.

I played around with furniture when I first got this house, and got the idea to add a garage to one side and a deck to the other. I have had a garage kit sitting around for at least ten years… it’s not the Houseworks one that Miniatures.com sells now, but an older one that I think was made by Timberbrook. My idea was to give it a flat top and use this as a patio.

Seeing it now, I’m not sure I like how it juts out on the side. The house is already huge and clunky and adding that might be too much. Still want to do the deck on the other side, though (particularly since I already bought a deck kit and hot tub…)

To add the garage, I would need to remove some siding from the side of the house (the part of the wall that would form the interior garage wall). Even though I’m undecided on the garage, I decided to pull up the siding anyway because there’s a little room behind it, that the previous owner boarded up when she sided the house, and I wanted to take a look.

I’m not sure what kind of glue she used, but luckily it hadn’t stuck very well. I was able to get the siding in this area relatively painlessly off by wedging a flat chisel-type tool underneath it. (Well, it was painless for me. The siding would probably beg to differ.) An old catalog entry for the Hillside Victorian referred to it as having a wine cellar—guess this is it!

Here’s how the little room relates to the garage. (The door hanging in space would have stairs leading down to the garage floor.) My original thought was to make this little room a bathroom, since none of the other rooms are really a good shape or size. But now that I’ve opened it up again, I want the room to be visible and accessible. I thought about hinging the wall piece so you can open it and look in, but that would make it tough to finish the garage wall, and with the garage in place it would also be awkward to open the wall and see in. Plexiglass is another option, but it seems odd to have Plexiglass looking in on your bathroom… (Note to self: this isn’t real life!)

Or, I could make the little room a laundry room and leave the opening open, with stairs leading into the garage. In this scenario I wouldn’t need to add a door leading into the garage, saving myself the trouble of cutting a hole, and it would be much easier to see and get my hands in to access the room, even with the garage in place. And I especially like that you get a peek of the washer and dryer from inside the house.

So my current thinking is to go with the laundry room, and if I don’t end up adding the garage, I’ll cover the opening with removable Plexiglass rather than closing it off with an exterior wall. Since I’m undecided about the garage, I won’t bother fixing up or painting the siding on this side of the house until I’ve made up my mind!

With the mystery of the hidden room solved, I moved onto the siding, which needed some TLC. Many pieces were loose and curled at the edges.

I went nuts with the wood glue and used tape and all varieties of clamps to hold the curled siding in place.

While that dried, I got a head start on the windows. This house came with working Houseworks windows and the panes can’t be removed, so I’m not sure the best way to tackle painting them. I started with one small non-working window (the acrylic easily slides out) and one window that’s broken at the sill, so I was able to slide out the panes first. It’ll be easy to fix, and I would gladly “break” the rest of them to help with painting, but I’m not sure I can do it without destroying them.

I’m so used to working in half scale that painting these windows was sort of surreal, I felt like a giant! But I’m sure I’ll appreciate that when it’s time to do the detail work…

The color scheme for this house is going to be light blue, with white trim and a dark blue accent color. The windows will probably need a second coat of white, and then I’ll do the blue the same way I did the tan accents on my Fairfield.

Here’s how it looks at the end of the first day… not too different from the beginning of the first day, but at least the most of the siding is glued down now!