Build in progress: Lady Zonneschut's dressing room, the sash window and the finishing touches.

Hello my friends, 

I started this room as a lockdown project during the first year of the Covid pandemic. And now, after almost two years I have finally time to finish building it. It is the first miniature room I have brought to completion and it has been an interesting learning curve for me. 

In this post I will show you how I made the window to fill in that huge window opening. Well not really. I got so caught up in the work itself That I forgot to take pictures. The above picture tells a lot of the story though. I cut a piece of 2 mm thick cardstock to fit the window opening and measured out where the 20 windowpanes would end up in the window frame. After marking them and cutting them out I had the rough shape of the window. I glued a piece of moulding (visualy) dividing the window in two parts. Then I painted it and and let it dry. 

While the paint was drying I cut out a piece from a clear plastic folder. I would prefer to use wood and real glass for these windows but again, this roombox started as a "lockdown project" and I limit myself to the materials I had available at that time. So cardstock and plastic it is.

And here we have a look of the window from the outside at a dry fit. The outside is not yet painted. I like the glimpse it offers of the interior of the dressing room.

But it does not end there. Because of the altered layout the four original walls no longer connect to each other. So I needed to add some wall pieces to fix the pink background of the corridor or side room to the walls of the green dressing room.

And then you get something like this in the picture above. The dark brown pieces envelop the walls and tie everything together. After I glued the different wall pieces together it became one sturdy roombox. And that is for the first time. 

Until now the walks in all pictures of the room in  previous posts were made with paint cans and whatever was at hand placed behind the loose wall pieces to keep them standing upright. Now that all the wall pieces are fixed together the visible seams needed to be filled in, smoothed and painted over to hide them. 

And that brings us to the dressing room looking like this. A window in place and no gaping gaps in the corners. We're really getting somewhere now! And now it was time to cut the floor and ceiling panel to size. 

And speaking of the floor panel, my chosen floor, the print of a highly decorative parquet floor had started to anoy me a bit. The wallpanels in this dressing room are also decorated with prints and so is the ceiling. Lockdown project or not, all these prints together are becoming a lot of prints for just one room....

So why not try an alternative for the floor?

So, with the help of the brown paint that I used for sealing off the supporting wall pieces I tried to mimic a wood grain for a plank floor. I added the paint with a large brush in a layer thin enough to let the white undercoat shine through in places.

Although the result is bit coarse for 1:12 it looks quite decent for a first try. With a sepia coloured fineliner I have given the illusion of individual planks. 

Now all this is done, it is time to furnish the room and make whatever miniatures are still missing. The picture below

is just a first set up. The "yoga mat" on the floor is just a placeholder for the Chaise longue I am making. But that will be the subject of another post.