Greenleaf Annabelle Dollhouse Project
Chapter 6

We managed to finish the section in between the areas of siding without too much difficulty, so we might as well do it again near the top.

This time we're going to get a little be more elaborate so we can bring out the character of this house. For this upper band, we're going to design our theme around a smooth background. It'd be too hard at this point to get the raw house shell as smooth as we'd like in this area, so we're going to take the easy way out and cover the shell with some wood sheeting. I took some fancy boards we have and turn them around so that the "nice" side is facing inward, and all that's visible is the smooth back.

We'll use some interior crown molding

at the top of the smooth board, the nice thing about this molding is that the back is not squared off, it's cut at a 45 degree angle,

so we can mount this molding and have it flare out both up and down to meet the other boards.

For the lower molding, we searched around and came up with a really fancy molded header which will look great.

As usual, we give the all the trim a coat of Gesso. We decide not to coat the heavy molding, it's already white. It's also very smooth so this may be a mistake, but we don't want to dull out the fine details with too many coats of finish.

Color selection time again, and this is supposed to be a Painted Lady, so we'll add another 2 colors to the house for this part of the project. The smooth background of the main band will be Violet Petal,

the massive lower molding is Plum,

and we'll match the main siding color by painting the upper molding Baby Pink.

After 3 coats of color, the pieces are ready to be applied

....but we have another surprise.

This part took a long time to figure out, but we finally have a great solution. A lot of the nicest Victorian homes have fishscale shingles on the side of the house as an accent - sometimes as a band around the house, sometimes used in the roof gables. Yes, that's what we're going to do here!

The idea sounds great but the execution isn't so easy. Not only would the detail work be very difficult, the shingles themselves that we've found are a little bit too large to look good on the side of the house. Also, the 3D effect of the shingles and the spaces between them don't seem to work when applied to the sides of the house. It may be that they actually use scalloped siding to get that effect, but we're not about to try to carve something like that ourselves!

After searching for something suitable, we came up with quite an unlikely solution.... MOLDED PLASTIC fishscale-patterned roofing sheets!

Perfect. We measure our gable triangles, cut them out,

and put them through the Gesso routine. One has a difficult cutout, just like we had to deal with in the lower siding, so we have to measure and cut out the keyed oval first.

After cutting and prepping the triangles, we paint them Phlox, the same color as the trim in the lower accent band of the house.

Now we need to apply these pieces to the 4 gables using Quick Grip. We start with the lower pieces,

, and as we work our way around, it's not too hard to add all of the pieces one after another.

Finally, we're going to pull the whole thing together by using a repeating series of ornate appliques

Since we want this to be a noticable accent, we can break out of the color scheme slightly and paint these an electric blue color called "Stars Forever". Not content with just a burst of color, we take it right over the top and and some shiny gold gilt to the leaf in the center of each shell and to the corns... or are they flaming torches, hmmm.

We'll put 3 into each gable band - the scallop shell appliques

will be in the center, with a pair of corn appliques

on each side.

We apply these around the entire house in the 4 bands and suddenly we have a house that's starting to get noticed.

What's Next
We've now completed six weekends of work on the house. This represents several more hours of work spaced over several short sessions during the weekend.

If you'd like to do this project along with us, we can special-order all the parts you need. Here's what we've bought so far:

Greenleaf Annabelle Dollhouse Kit $169.95
Cir-Kit Deluxe Wiring Kit $109.95
Real Wood Siding 24" x 3" with 1/2" board spacing $2.95 ea
Hobbyist Tool Kit $49.95
Brass Hammer $11.95
Gesso, 32oz bottle $11.95
metal file set $12.95
Assembled Curved Stairway $39.95
Sunburst Door
Clapboard Siding
Beadboard
Picture Frame Molding
Copper Foil
Quick Grip Cement

You can get these supplies listed below in any hardware store:
2" width paint brush
sandpaper
masking tape
Carpenter's Wood Glue

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CHAPTER 7

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