Happy Memorial Day!
A few days ago, I finally had the chance to work on the flooring for the Coventry Cottage dollhouse. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with it at first, but after browsing around the local craft shop and finding skinny craft sticks, I decided that they would make perfect “hardwood” floors for the cottage.
I simply glued (wood glue) to the skinny sticks to the floor of the cottage. Here’s the gallery that shows the process of installing the floors.
In the end, I am not 100% happy with the hardwood floors. The skinny sticks are not uniform and since I was fighting against time (drying glue), I was rushing in choosing the sticks, so there are some spots that show very obvious gaps. the reason I went about doing it this way is due to the contraction and wood curling during the roofing process. In foresight, I should have just used a *much* thicker stock of paper as a base to avoid the contracting of the paper.
After the hardwood flooring, I decided to go ahead and install the second floor carpet as well. My dollhouse’s “carpet” is faux suede. I bought a square yard of the fabric so you will probably see it in future dollhouses.
I wanted to use spray adhesive (which is pretty much cement glue) to adhere the fabric to the floor. To make this process easier, I cut out the floor pattern on some card stock seen below.
I cut out the proper area of fabric to get ready for the spray adhesive process.
Not shown is the spray adhering process. The spray adhesive is highly flammable and stinks something bad, so I was outside for this. I wanted to make sure the fabric wouldn’t somehow peel off, so I sprayed both the fabric as well as the card stock. I did not stick them together right away though, I let it dry, or tack up for about 30 seconds before sticking them together. This helps bond the two surfaces better.
Smoothing out the fabric wasn’t too hard, since the fabric was relatively stiff and thick on its own.
In the end, I have a nice flat carpeting surface:
The carpeting fits the 2nd floor perfectly. I’ve decided that I won’t be gluing the carpeted card stock permanently to the Coventry Cottage in case I want to change it in the future!
After this worked out so well, like I mentioned earlier, I will be trying out this process for the hardwood floors on thicker card stock.
All in all, it was a productive day mini-ing.
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