Walls up!

At this stage I decided to fill in the big interior window in the left wall (that's the left wall piece on the green cutting mat in the picture above). The interior window is upstairs in the bedroom next to the stairwell. I saw this done on Susan Grimshaw's website, and agreed that it would be more useful to have a solid wall in that spot for furniture placement or a picture or mirror.

The easiest way to do this is to leave the pieces you're meant to punch out in place. In this hole there were pieces I needed for the bookcase, so I did punch those out then replaced them with leftover small pieces of plywood. I then filled in all the gaps with polyfilla. Then lots of sanding, priming then painting. And voila, no more window!

While it slows things down a bit to do these things as you go along I'm glad I did because it would be a lot harder to work on a vertical wall in the house later on. Also while working on this wall I was priming and painting other pieces I needed. This kind of thing is easy, just a bit time consuming.

But the next part, putting in the second floor, was a nightmare. So frustrating! The instructions tell you to angle the floor and side it in place but there are a lot of pieces that need to fit around it and it can be fiddly getting it in place with all the tabs fitting together.

I had a problem mainly because I had painted it first. So the pieces were sort of gripping each other and I had to try to wiggle/wedge it in place, then wiggle it back out and sand it down (and trim the sides of the tabs), then try again, many many many times.

The red spots are sticky notes labelling the pieces.

Then ironically after that there was a gap between the centre wall and the second floor. At this point I was extra annoyed with the kit. But in the end it was done and it was quite satisfying to be at this stage. You can really start to see the whole house, how big it is, how big the rooms are, and you have a sense of how things are arranged and put together.

I also decided that any discrepancy up to around 3/16" is fine. And the gaps will be covered with flooring or filler later on. After working with lots of pieces I realized that's just sometimes as close as I could get to everything fitting together neatly.

I thought I would take a break at this stage but that's not been the case. In my next post, the stairs!