Inspiration continues

Today I am putting some more work into the house. As you begin a project such as this it is amazing the many areas that confirmation comes into play. Watching TV this morning, statements are popping up all over the place that are motivating me to get stuck into the house. The motivation of the day is this statement...

"Now go. Know what you want, and when you find it, chase it. You'll know what to do."
from the Jackrabbit Factor

The hardest part currently is working out the order in which to do things - do I paint before I glue, glue before I paint. My mind is going ninety-to-the dozen as things inspire me. Cladding, paint, wallpaper. My initial focus has to be to cut out all of the bits. New thought - I am going to plaster the house - the plaster will add strength to the model. Windows were my most interesting challenge. Cutting card leaves a cardboard edge exposed, and once the window trimmings are added, the exposed card edge will still show through. Plaster will allow me to finish these edges. I will have to see how it goes - extra weight on the roof will need to be stabilised. Anyway off to cut some more. I will post some more pictures after todays efforts.

Miniature Goals

Breaking a huge task down into smaller managable tasks is the way to achieve something that seems impossible. My biggest frustration is that I do not own my own house. I have seen some innovative ways of getting around this. The most creative I have seen was the guy who aimed to turn a paper clip into a house. Amazingly enough last time I heard he had made it to a car, which is impressive given that he started from nothing.

My mission is to build my house - starting small. Inspired by a shower one morning, I decided that I would start with miniature houses, sell them and progressively build larger and larger until I am able to fund building our full size house. I have had no formal woodworking experience - when I went to Intermediate females were not allowed to do woodwork or metalwork. I did do tech drawing in third and fourth form, and I am looking forward to the challenge.

I have a problem with visualisation - in that I am a kinestetic person - I find it easier to see in my mind if I can touch / feel the item I am trying to realise. Having a real house to base my visualisation on will help me make our house a reality.

This week I had a weeks leave so I did some research into materials, plans, etc. It has been a fun exercise trying to work out what I will build the house out of. My friend recommended cardboard, however I didnt think it would be robust enough. I decided on MDF. However I found a really cool website http://homepages.slingshot.co.nz/~gasayers/doll/ which inspired me immensely. He used a cardboard house as the initial mockup, so I thought it would be logical to not waste wood when I got to that stage, and decided that it would be wise to start with cardboard.

On Thursday I purchased some essential items for building our cardboard house.

• 3 x A3 sheets of heavy weight card


• An Electric Glue Gun with glue sticks


• Craft PVA Glue


• Clear Cellotape


• A metal ruler


• A craft knife


• A craft cutting board


• Pencils


• An eraser

Friday I downloaded and printed some plans http://www.thewoodcrafter.net/proj/p40.php. The Victorian dollshouse was fantastic for ideas on how to put together the finer details for the house.
I used a floorplan from a house we were going to get built a few years back.
Here is the photo of getting started

The hard part was working out what scale to use for the house. I started with the numbers on the floorplan - for a 3x3 room I made it 3 inches by 3 inches. However the difficulty was that every room did not have dimensions on it. With a bit of tweaking I settled on measuring the inside walls length in centimetres and then transposing it to inches - 3.6cm became 3 inches plus 6 marks past 3 inches. It seemed to work well.

The hardest part was cutting, and getting used to driving the cutting tool. It was a little rough to begin with, but as the day progressed I progressively got more used to how to best get the straightest, nicest cut.

Here are a couple of photos of the progress from day one...