Don: It must be obvious, but I’ll say it anyway. Don’t read this post!!
Finding time to work on the Top Secret Project when Don isn’t around makes me feel like I’m a character in one of the mysteries I love to read. It’s rather like spying, or watching and waiting like a detective on a stake-out. Waiting until he goes out door, then a spurt of activity: running up the steps, uncovering the house, quickly spiriting it downstairs to the kitchen. Running up and down the steps gathering paint brushes, sandpaper, paints, varnishes. Keeping an eye on the clock.
I’ve resorted to asking him to call me when he’s on his way home. I need a heads up so I can put everything back in place before he pulls in the driveway. The other day I was talking on the phone to Judy while I was working on the house and I somehow sensed that I needed to get it out of the kitchen. Right away. I carried it up the stairs, holding the phone between my head and my shoulder, still talking away to Judy. Suddenly, the phone slipped out and dropped to the floor and I had to shout out “Hang on Judy! I’ve dropped the phone!” while I put the house back in place and covered it up again.
Yikes. And wouldn’t you know it, Don came through on call waiting and said he was on his way home – not only that, he was just down the road! I wouldn’t have had time to get everything stashed if I hadn’t listened to that little voice in my head.
Needless to say, Don has been informed that ‘on my way home’ means something a bit different than ‘just down the street.’
Anyway, I finished the wood floor.
I tested a stain on a scrap piece of the flooring, but it looked too dark for what I was going for. I don’t want the floors to look like the floors in Hummingbird Cottage. I want it light and airy and studio-like. Instead of stain, I lightly sanded the floor with extra fine sandpaper and then applied two coats of Delta Ceramcoat Satin Finish Varnish. It really brought out the grain of the wood.
If you remember, it originally looked like this:
Of course, the lighting at any given moment will change the way the floor looks from photo to photo, but I think you can see that the varnish really made a wonderful difference.
I followed the instructions and used a cement glue, rather than a white glue, to attach it to the floor. Then I pressed and pressed until it was firmly in place. Then I placed several heavy books on top of the floor and left them in place overnight.
That did the trick.
Had to bring in the Eames chair.
Sometimes the egg cups just want to get in on the action. After all, this one lives on the mantel shelf just above my workspace.
She looks surprised, doesn’t she?
I love that this floor looks different depending on the light.
I’m very happy with it. Now, on to the baseboards.
The flooring I used is by Houseworks and is made of “genuine wood veneers which have been laminated to a special paper to ensure easy staining, varnishing, and installation.” It comes in a 11″ by 17″ sheet. I used two sheets for this project. You can probably buy it at a variety of online sites, but I got mine at HBS/miniatures.com. This was Random Plank, which I chose because I love that look.
Oh, for a lottery win. Money for miniatures and books and the mortgage. That’s not too much to ask, right?
Happy Saturday.
You amaze me. Just great.
Thank you, Barbara!
Claudia, I love the floor! The color is great and the Eames chair just looks at home there…the cute egg cup, not so much (lol). I love that you are doing this as a surprise for Don, he will love it. Oh yes the lottery win would change everything wouldn’t it!
hugs,
Linda
It sure would!
The flooring looks marvelous!
Thank you so much for the information about the floor installation. I’m thinking all those neglected heavy law books lying around the office will come in handy one day for pressing dollhouse floors. I’m sure I’m not the only one who would like to know more about your wishlist for the studio. A sketch or two of the “grand plan” would be fascinating to see.
I wish I had had a heavy law book – it would be perfect for the task. I will take your advice and write about my ideas for the studio, maybe sketching the supposed plan would help me commit to what I want to do with this space.
It might prove useful on a number of levels. Other miniaturists/collectors that follow your blog might be able to provide helpful links or how-tos for specific items.
Exactly. And I can use all the help I can get!
Hi Claudia,
Not only do I like the way that you’ve finished your wood floor,but I also like the photos of the Eames Chair and the Egg Cup. For whatever reason, the movie “The Prince and the Showgirl”, popped into my head, especially the way she has her eyes turned towards the”royalty” she is sitting besides. So Cute! But even more than the photos ( which are Terrific) , was your funny story which preceded it! Wouldn’t it be nice if you could print out the portions pertaining to this build and present it to Don, too ? Here is “The Story Of…” along with “The Studio” , once it is finished. After all ( Secret Agent Claudia ), just look at all of the Top Secret and Behind the scenes information that he’s been instructed NOT to read, but which he might also get a kick out of, after he admires his fabulous Eames chair.
Oh, what a good idea, Elizabeth. I could print them out and put them in a little booklet! Brilliant.
Thank you for that great idea, my friend.
I can see mini-Don sitting on the Eames chair, strumming! Love the natural light color of the floor. The varnish really made it pop. LOL, will Egg Cup want a cottage of her own?
Okay, now you’ve got me thinking about a little Egg Cup cottage!!
Too funny, Claudia! …… Seriously? That would actually be rather charming!
Well, it might be something to think about. Don’t know how I’d do it yet, but wouldn’t it make a great display for the individual egg cups when I do my annual egg cup posts?
Miniature vignettes for your various egg cups. Sort the egg cups by theme and then create the little rooms by theme. Then you can swap the egg cups in and out of its room. It could be like a shadowbox, but with tiny rooms instead of one large enclosure. The creative artistry would be the walls, floor and ceiling, as you wouldn’t have any room in the middle for furniture.
That will be an intriguing project for the future. I think it’s a great idea, Wendy!
The secret project is looking wonderful. Love the flooring and oh my – that chair. Can’t wait to see it progress!
Have a great weekend dear friend.
Judy
You too, dear Judy! I’m mitering corners for the baseboard as I write this!
your floor looks great!
when you know who finally sees you know what… you will have to get pictures of his reaction
he will be thrilled
great job
I will. Whenever it gets finished! I’ll have to give it to him in the daytime and video his reaction.
Great job Claudia..the flooring is so much nicer now…That is a good idea from Hi elizabeth s above to make a booklet of the progress for Don…I bet he would really enjoy it…The whole project is so interesting to watch…I wish I could be a little bird sitting on your shoulder watching it all happen..
You’d hear me curse a lot, Nancy! But that, of course, is part of the process!
lol…
xo
Staining the floor DID bring out every beautiful bit of it. And the Eames chair looks made for that space. Very suitable for a guy too – no comfy plump chintz-upholstered wing chair for this room. Eager to see the finished studio. PS – I thought of you just minutes ago when watching PBS ‘America’s Test Kitchen’ and saw that their testers rated Peets coffee as BEST. My Starbucks Italian Roast wasn’t even mentioned. LOL – happy weekend! ?
Yay for Peets! Don just brought some home – we were running out. Horrors!
Oh, I think about winning the Lottery all the time…but, in order to that, I need to buy a ticket, which I never do!!!
The floor turned out perfect. I didn’t want to say anything negative but, on the first go’round I thought it looked ‘way too light. Now it’s perfect; has a real ‘quality’ look to it. How smart of you to know how much to tweak it!
I’m still mulling our (previous post) exchange on winter prep. When you have to monitor the pipes to make sure they aren’t freezing, what do you do? Wake yourself up at 3am and then run hot water down them or something? Excuse my ignorance but I can’t imagine the stress of busted pipes in a storm. I was thinking maybe you wrapped exposed ones with some kind of cloth or tape? You’re right; it DOES sound like a lot of work!!
Yes, we have wrapped certain pipes with a foam covering made for pipes. But we can’t get to all of our pipes because we have a very narrow crawl space under the kitchen. We also run a hot water drip – there’s a real art to figuring out how much to drip so it doesn’t suddenly stop during the night. Don is in charge of that, though when he’s away, I do it. We run a drip at the kitchen sink and in the downstairs bathroom sink. We’ve had our pipes freeze before but thankfully we’ve always caught it in time. It’s one of the reasons we have to have someone here all the time in the winter. If we didn’t, the pipes would freeze.
As we used to say in the animal hospital (where I worked for a time) it’s a real PITA. You can figure out what that stands for!
Thanks for explaining. A PITA but also just a lot of worry and stress over several months although I guess it becomes second nature to know what to do, and when.
It does. But that’s when we start to hate winter and long for warmer climes.
Vicki, I don’t know if you will see this, but 2 winters ago our entire village (about 7000 people) were mandated to keep water dripping 24×7 in all homes & businesses for about 8 weeks. The infrastructure of pipework underground is getting old, as most of that was set 70-100 years ago as central plumbing came to be, and those pipes are getting quite old and susceptible to breakage. That along with a frost depth of about 6 feet and we had pipes bursting all over town. They said the best way to help was to run water in the basement, closest to where the pipes enter the house. It was a horrific winter that year with extremely low temperatures.
Wow, I find all this discussion of how to live in cold weather just fascinating. We were 96 degrees this afternoon and it ‘seems like’ anybody I run into lately can only talk about where they want to move (anywhere but here in water restriction, heat and drought although, curiously, we are also bathed uncomfortably in humidity…it’s not like any Southern California I’ve ever known and I’m a native).
I asked my husband about how he remembered growing up in the Midwest and he said his parents would run some kind of heater in the basement to keep pipes from freezing down there…like Claudia, he said they lived in an old house and the crawlspace was too narrow for his dad to shinny into (and his dad, unlike my husband, was a pretty little guy whereas my hub is big and tall). My husband said that as a young adult, he lived in a house where the pipes froze and they came home to water spewing all over the kitchen and, once, when on vacation and getting caught by surprise with a early storm back home, the power went off which shut off the temperature control on his large fish tank, so he arrived back at the house with a tank full of prized dead fish worth a heck of a lot of money but, mostly, he said it just made him feel so sad.
I research places constantly of where to possibly move to in the retirement years which are not that far off. They have those “Best Places’ articles on the web for this and that, whatever you’re looking for, be it low property taxes or certain amenities. It just seems of course that no place is perfect. I’m sure in beautiful Wisconsin you have, like Claudia has, the lovely autumns and springs…defined seasons (which California does not have). We have earthquakes but Florida and nearby states including the Gulf ones have hurricanes. I’m always looking for the place which doesn’t get too hot or too cold but I don’t think such a place exists (except maybe Carmel, California, where only wealthy people can afford to live!). In the meantime, try to bloom where planted!!
PS: Claudia and I had exchanged comments some months back about the aging infrastructure in a city and I hadn’t realized til she mentioned it that it is indeed a problem all over the U.S. with a lot of towns having been formed around the same time and also which are aging all at the same pace. As you said and I think Claudia meant, although I was clueless about it, I guess it was when central plumbing became a possibility anywhere; I just didn’t know the history on this subject. I live in a small town which is basically ‘dying’ economically and the city can’t afford to fix streets and a lot of things, so they keep patching an old sewer line and old water pipes from neighborhood to neighborhood, and one of the city workers who I somewhat know said, on the side, that he does worry about when we have The Big One (earthquake) what will happen because we also don’t have the ‘man’power to handle what he fears will be mass infrastructure breakdown citywide. At least with a tornado (I lived on the Gulf Coast for a brief time), you often get a little warning if you’re tuned in to a radio or TV station and can get to shelter but, you know, with an earthquake, you just have to hope for the best and can only do so much prep.
Oh…the floor looks great! I like the vintage contemporary cottage vibe you have going there…Don is going to love it! ;)
I hope so, Donnamae!
Love it! Love it! Love it! The chair is precious! Great job, Claudia!
Thank you, Dottie!
What a classy little studio! The floor is just perfect.
Thank you, Nancy!
The floor is beautiful! Again, that Eames chair so reminds me of Frasier!!
The idea to capture the story of the new build is a great one. I know you will be so happy to have it all together. And Don will love it!!
I was just watching Frasier last night and I think of the TSP every time I see his chair.
Turned out great!! :D
Thank you, Brae!