Had a talk with Lolly from Lolly's Dollhouses and she went through the sequence of steps with me. For any of you doing a fixer-upper dollhouse this might be helpful:
1. Purchase windows to replace broken ones.
2. Adjust window openings to fit. I’ll be cutting some openings bigger and getting wood of the same thickness as the house walls and wood gluing it in to make some of the openings smaller.3. Primer the entire house, inside and out, except for any floors I plan on staining. The primer will be a good base for glueing the siding on without the glue absorbing into the wood. Lolly tried to talk me into doing stucco. She showed me a gorgeous grey mansion she stuccoed with white window trim and navy shutters. All you do is put sand in your paint – very realistic looking. But, I’m attached to the idea of light pink wood siding.
4. Attach unprimered, unpainted siding. Hopefully you have the siding with a groove that lets the top piece lay seamlessly on the one beneath it. If not you can bevel the underside edge with an exacto. There is a magical glue (Beacon Multi grip glue) that must be used for siding. Put the glue on back of siding in a zig-zag fashion. Place on house and mush it around to get the glue evenly spread. Pull the siding away from the house so you have drippy strings of glue hanging in the air. Wait 5 seconds and put back down in permanent place. Lay very heavy things on top of it! Primer and paint siding after it is all glued on.
5. Wire the entire house. The siding must already be on to support the hammering in of the doohickeys. Do all wiring first so that wallpaper goes over it. It’s carried by thin ribbons of metal so you won’t see it under the paint/wallpaper. Even though I won’t have purchased the fixtures by now I should have the wiring go all the way to the location of each light. I also must remember to take a pic of the house all wired so if there is an electrical problem in the future I will know where the lines run. Lolly said it would be about $80 to wire the whole house.6. Do not put windows in yet. Put in crown molding first, then wallpaper, the window holes can be razor bladed out so that there is no working around window trim.
7. Put in windows. Inside trim of windows.
8. Floors – paint, hardwood, tile, etc.
9. Baseboard.
10. Furnish
