Video: Dilettante’s Dollhouse Episode #8: Painting the Exterior

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Happy Dollhouse Sunday!

I am so excited to share this post with you all as I am finally painting the exterior of the dollhouse!  If you remember in last week’s episode I primed the exterior. In all I did 2 coats of primer. For the white, I forgot (again) to bring the trim paint we had at home to the studio so I used acrylic paint instead and it worked great! It has a nice gloss which I liked for the scallops and the trim and it really pops against the soft pink color.

I know I have mentioned a bunch of times that the pink I am using is the same color of my studio walls and I just love that this dollhouse will have a piece of my first ever studio with it for years and years to come.

I began by trimming out the excess siding from the inside of the windows using my craft knife (affiliate link). I know I ended up taking a bit of the wood with it as well but I am not worried since I will be building my own windows along with the interior and exterior trim.

Once I did that I began with painting the scallops white. I also painted the underneath of the roof that hangs over and all the currently brown trim.

If I were doing this over again I would probably wait to attach the scallops and first paint the color on the lower part, then paint the scallop pieces and then attach them. It was a little fiddly painting where the scallops and the siding met but not at all hard and it came out really nice when I used a smaller brush.

I also noticed that some of the side pieces weren’t glued down the best so I added some more wood glue and attached them with some clamps to dry overnight. This worked perfectly!

I then moved on to the siding and painting it pink.

For the purposes of the video I just painted the front but for you blog readers I will give you some sneak peak information. I have (as of writing this) completed the whole exterior painting and it looks amazing!!! I am beyond happy with how it turned out. In the end it was about 3 coats of paint on top of the 2 coats of primer. I think if you were using darker colors you wouldn’t need as many layers but what’s really nice about the cardboard is it dries so quickly. By the time I finished both sides I was able to go back and paint the front and then move back to the sides. It worked really well and went much more quickly than I expected.

Here’s how it turned out:

The best part is that I can now move inside the dollhouse! I still have lots of finishing touches for the exterior-along with a fun idea for the “walkway” that wraps around the house on 3 sides-but some of those will require purchases I can’t make just yet. Instead I am going to move inside for next week’s video and the first thing to do is figure out how I am going to lay everything out inside which means deciding on the stairs. That also means building a template for the stairs so I can move it around and see where I like it best. I have an idea on how to do that so here’s hoping it works!

Well that’s it for this week. I hope you enjoyed seeing how the dollhouse has progressed. I am just in love with this hobby! I can’t see how I could ever be bored with it 🙂

Until next time…

-Michele, aka The Dreaming Dilettante

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