The first task in rehabbing the 1/12th scale dollhouse my grandfather built was to take out all of the old flooring and wallpapers. The wallpapers were mostly easy enough to deal with, except for a few rough patches. I basically just sprayed the walls down with water and then used a straight edge razor to scrape off the wet paper. Some of the paper I was able to pull off dry though. The flooring was another matter however. ^^; First of all, the downstairs floor has a layer of some sort of brown paper-like substance glued onto the wood. I remember a while back when the very original textured wallpaper flooring was pulled up and replaced with carpet, some of the paper was left behind and the carpet and tile just placed on top of it. It looks ugly, but, for the most part, it doesn’t bother anything or make things look bad when covered, so I think I will leave it alone since it’s proving to be a real bear to get off. Even sanding that stuff isn’t yielding fantastic results. The second pain in the rump is that removing that old velveteen carpet was difficult, as lots of little fibers wanted to stay behind and cling to the hardened glue on the floor. Again I used water as a solvent, and slowly but surely pulled the carpet up.
Presumably because my grandfather was just making this for a kid to play with, he didn’t bother to properly frame out the windows and add interior trim. Basically each window hole you see is a pure cut in the wood. This being said, I decided to undertake removing all of the trim in order to properly frame all the windows and add interior trim. Of course this was a very tricksy thing to do because the wood is not only old, but it’s also not the best quality of wood either. Basically I took a spackling knife, and with a hammer, wheedled that knife under each piece of trim and popped them off. Sometimes I had more success than others, and I have a couple “boo-boos”. I’m going to have to take the sander to everything now to clean it up, and spackle my booboos as well as other flaws in the wood.
Finally, I decided that the roof needed to come off as well, for a couple reasons. The first reason is that it was on there a little kaddiewampus. I remember that the roof started coming off a long time ago when I was a little girl….probably from moving it around in the room, so my dad put it back on again and I guess he didn’t bother to be perfect. ^^; The other reason is that it will make it a whole lot easier to frame out the attic window and apply new paint and papers to the upstairs rooms. Right now, the roof is sitting on the floor at the foot of my bed, where my cat is using it as a hidey-hole. XD She’s going to be upset when it goes back on the house!
Anyway, I’m breaking for the night. I’ll resume sanding tomorrow, and then hopefully start work on framing out all of the windows. I went out earlier in the day and got all the wood I needed to do so, plus some extra to make some nifty little swing open windows that I’m going to try to make in the original criss-cross design of the original plastic windows. This means I’ll need more hinges however! Thankfully I still have Xmas money to help me rehab this house. 🙂
