Building the Walls

I'm very happy with the progress I made over the long weekend.  With the floors finished the next thing I did was create the door.  The question I get asked most often on my dioramas is "how did you make the door?" Well, I take the doll I am making a diorama for and go to Michael's or AC Moore and walk up and down the frame aisle until I find the correct scale "door."   Here is a picture of the finished door next to an identical frame that I used:

  Wait for Michael's to have a 50% off frames weekly special.  This frame retails for $40, it was 50% off on weekly special and I had a coupon for an additional 20% so I got them for $16.  When making a door out of a frame all you have to do is rearrange it.  Remove the cardboard backing, the matte, and the glass from the frame.  Put the matte in first, then the paper, then the cardboard backing, then the glass and then close it up.  You have to put everything back so it doesn't jiggle around but you want the matte up front to give you that paneled-door look.  I then spray painted it with a brown gloss spray paint and used scrapbooking doo-dads for the knob and keyhole.  I then glued it to the wall where I wanted it.  Obviously this trick doesn't work if you need a working door.  Well, I suppose there must be a way but that's to be figured out another day.  Hmmmm....I wonder....

I then moved on to the wall boards.   I used 4" wide balsa planks and cut them in half longways.  This is in contrast to the floorboards which were made from 3" wide balsa before being cut in half longways.  So each wall board is 2" wide and each floor board is 1.5" wide.  This contrast makes it more visually appealing and also more realistic.  The wall boards in the attic in my house are 12 inches wide and the floor boards are 8 inches wide so the ratio is good.  

Two people emailed me and told me I was nuts for making wall boards and that the bare walls, spray painted walnut, looked great as they were.  So this next pic is for them.  Really, look at the difference that a relatively small additional dollar investment and a, well, okay, HUGE, time investment makes:

I won't lie, these individual boards are a labor of love.  Each board has to be cut individually, spray painted on all sides, and mounted to the walls.  But you can't beat the realistic look, imho.  The above photo shows how I cut the boards to fit.  The long back wall was easy because it's a rectangle.  The two side walls were more time consuming.  Here's what you do:  first you cut a board and you snip the end on the diagonal until you get the right fit to the angle of the slope of the roof.  Then you use that piece as a template to cut the ends of all remaining pieces because the slope of the roof is equal all the way up.  Once you have a bunch of boards cut with the correct angle for the roofline, you trim the non-angled end to fit.  Glue them all in place and you're good to go:

And here's a pic of the left side:

and here's a full-view pic of the finished attic walls.  There were a few extra boards so I also started the left side ceiling.  I still have to do the rest of the ceiling and the support beams, which aren't really needed for support, they will just be decorative:

and here is The Queen, herself, stopping by to check on my progress:

Yes, Evangeline, it comes with central-air and parking.