December 12

After a couple of missteps, I finally have the bottom floor of the ranch house built. The house has 44 columns supporting the balcony above it, and I initially tried to use a 1/4" basswood for them. After attempting to paint them and draw little white lines for the brick grout, I gave up and switched to brick-patterned paper that I bought at the dollhouse store. It was bright red and white, so I painted it with a wash of dirty grey-brown paint to tone it down a bit. I had wrapped around half of the pillars when I went town to see the ranch on Saturday, and discovered that the width was way out of scale. So... I started over with 1/8" wood, and finally finished gluing paper on them.

Then came gluing them to the base, which was also a challenge: the little tiny tops of the columns aren't big enough to get a nice, flat surface to glue to the base, so they were all wobbling around while the glue was drying. The wood on top has an uneven color, but only the outside 1/2" will show once the top floor is assembled, so it shouldn't be a problem.