Roof and exterior walls

The Roof

I begin the roof by putting a long block onto the base of two triangles and then securing these to the main body of the dollhouse.

Across one of these (The side of the house without the chimney) I place one cutout bit of wood as the roof:

I take the same sized block of wood and saw it down near one edge and add some hinges, filing down a slight depression for them to sit flush:

Next I use some scraps to make an angled box for the chimney and cover this in brickwork paper and add a hinge at the shallow end:

I secure this to the hinged portion of the roof (after drilling a hole under where the chimney would sit) and here we have both roof access for maintenance/storage of spare bulbs etc, and a clever 60s batman style mechanism for accessing the switch to control the house lights:

To fill the gap in the apex of the roof I just used some woodfiller. I could’ve filed an angled edge to both sides of the roof so that one lies over the other, but I was quickly running out of time:

Next I apply rooftop-patterned paper to the roof and move onto the exterior walls and the all-important doors to play with.

External walls and doors

Before getting to grips with the doors and surrounds, I fill in the wallspace that won’t be functional in any way; I just cut some wood to match then paper over it with brick-patterned paper:

If we look at the top right room in the image above, we can see that there is the room, a piece of interior structure just above it (for the door to rest against) and the pillar to the left of it.

Against this pillar we will put a small panel of wall, then with a hinge to this we will attach the door:

Now that the door opens with a hinge a bit further in rather than at the very edge of the house, both external-facing sides of the room can have a door open at once without these doors rubbing or banging against each other.

I then fitted another door to the bathroom using a different style of fastening mechanism (for each door I tried to add a different mechanism for opening and closing to keep things interesting for a 2 year old child)

After that it’s the same for the rest of the walls and then adding some finishing touches: