Miniature PI office part 2

After finishing building the PI office, I began to work on making furniture for it.  I started out by making the occasional table and bookcase.  As I mentioned in the previous post about this project, the office had to be scaled down to fit the room box I was using.  Therefore, the furniture would need to be scaled down as well.  I made patterns for the various pieces of furniture using the measurements provided in the instructions to see what wouldn’t fit or would need to be scaled down a bit.

                                                                                                

No measurements were given for the bookcase, so I just came up with my own measurements and then wound up using instead measurements from a miniature bookcase that’s in one of my other houses to make the pattern.

The pattern for the occasional table turned out to be too large for the office and so was extensively cut down to a smaller size.  The file cabinet remained the same size, but the loveseat and desk that I planned to make was changed to a chair and much smaller desk due to space constraints.

Making the bookcase and occasional table was fairly simple after making the necessary changes to the sizes of the items.  I decided to not follow the article’s instructions and held off on painting the pieces until after construction was complete.  This worked out fine and I found it easier to paint an unfinished piece of furniture as opposed to tiny pieces of wood or thick cardboard.  I did find the choice of the paint color to be a bit odd and I’m still not sure if the article’s author intended for the pieces to have an olive greenish tint to them, but that’s the color I got when I mixed some black acrylic paint with the raw sienna and gel medium together.  It seemed to be an odd choice, but perhaps the author wanted a bit of contrast from the wood grain finish of the office walls.  To my eye it seems as though just another shade of brown would’ve been fine, but perhaps the author wanted something a bit more extreme and to give more of an impression of an aged appearance to the office.

Since I still wasn’t sure how small I wanted to make the desk and chair, I held off on constructing these and focused on making the file cabinet next.  I decided to paint the pieces and then glue them together first per the instructions, since I was a bit intimidated by making this piece.  The instructions and diagrams seemed pretty extensive at first glance, so it seemed important to follow them closely.  My first mistake was deciding to use metallic silver paint instead of just a regular gray spray paint or acrylic paint.  I found soon after that the paint was too bright and intense for a file cabinet and tried to remedy it by mixing black and a light gray paint together to get the desired shade.  This didn’t work out either and wound up looking a bit streaky in places, so I decided I needed to get some gray spray paint or at least a darker gray acrylic paint.  In the end, I never found any gray spray paint that met my specifications and settled for a darker gray acrylic paint.

The instructions for the file cabinet I found were less than desirable and sections of them seemed to have been edited out from the article.  I don’t feel this is the author’s fault and more that of whoever edited the author’s submitted article.  First the instructions give the measurements for the front, sides, bottom, top, and back of the file cabinet and then tell you to cut these out and paint them and then glue some of them together.  Then it talks about scoring lines in the front piece to indicate where the drawers are and then to cut through some of the layers of the board in the narrow areas between the cuts and peel off a couple of layers to form the recessed drawer spacers.

Since the front piece was already been painted along with the other pieces this narrow leaves white areas where the layers of board have been peeled away and no where else in the instructions does it say to paint over these areas.  I wound up painting the white areas because they looked pretty unsightly.  Then after gluing the front pieces to the partially constructed file cabinet it talks about cutting out pieces to make the open drawer of the cabinet.  It seemed strange to me to present cutting pieces for the drawer at this stage in the instructions, when they could’ve been included when giving the measurements for the other file cabinet pieces and been asked to set them aside once they’d been painted.  The instructions also never mention painting these pieces, but it seemed logical to me so I painted them.  Again, this isn’t the author’s fault, but seems to be something that should’ve been realized while editing the piece for publication.

After the drawer is glued together and painted, I slid it in the opening even though there was nothing mentioned about this in the instructions.  I saw no need to glue it in place, since it seemed to fit snugly. 

Next on the agenda for the file cabinet was making the drawer labels and the slots that they fit into.  The lettered labels are provided in the instructions, but all that said about creating the slots is to cut the tabs from silver cardstock for each drawer—no sizing information is given as to what the dimensions should be.  At first I found this daunting and wasn’t sure what I could do to “fix” my problem of trying to figure out how large to make them when it occurred to me to glue the drawer labels to the silver cardstock and then once the glue dried cut out the tabs with the labels centered on the silver cardstock.  The trick seemed to be to cut so that a silver edge was evenly around the labels.  Because again the instructions failed me, I used the picture in the article to glue the labels in what I believed to be the right place on the file drawers.

I used heavy duty staples to make the handles, per the instructions.  These had the legs trimmed and holes were poked into the drawer fronts 1/4” up from the drawer bottom and glued in place.

Since I’ve finished creating the bookcase, occasional table, and file cabinet, next on my list is to begin working on a desk for the office.

Miniature PI office

I one of my other lives I worked in a toy store that also sold dollhouse supplies.  In an issue of Dollhouse Miniatures magazine there was an article where someone had made a PI office.  When I saw it, I immediately wanted to make it, but for some reason I didn’t.  However, the idea of making it never left the back of my mind.

Years later, I obtained a copy of the article through interlibrary loan.  The instructions called for making the office out of ½” thick foam core board.  I searched around where I live and could never find any, so I knew that I’d have to find an alternative. 

While working at the toy store, I had participated in a class where we were to make a garden inside a room box.  All of our supplies were provided for us to create the garden; however, I never finished mine and instead it sat on a shelf in a closet for about a decade waiting for me to do something with it.

 Contents of room box

 When I finally got around to working on my PI office project, I decided to use the room box from my garden project.  I pulled the box out of the closet and examined it to see what needed to be done before turning it into a detective office.

The box still had everything in it from the garden class.  I found that the brick walls had been glued to the walls and that there was a “grass” covered thick piece of Styrofoam.  I was able to remove everything except for the brick walls.  These I tried at first to remove by sticking an X-acto knife or something similar behind it and wedging it from the walls of the box.  This didn’t work, but I found that heating the brick walls with a hair drier heated up the glue that was holding in place enough for me to get a butter knife behind the walls and slowly peel them off. 

In the process of removing the brick walls

After this arduous process, I found there were still remains of the glue on the walls.  This I sanded off so that it wouldn’t interfere with my painting and papering of the walls.  My next step was to make a wood floor for the office, which I did by using individual floor boards that had come from a pack that I’d obtained from my days working at the toy store. 

The boards were a wonderful walnut color and I wasn’t sure if they would mesh well with my project.  Because my idea had been that I would stain the floor to co-ordinate with the walls of the office.  After cutting and gluing the boards to a piece of cardboard cut to fit the inside of the room box, I sanded it after the glue had dried.  Then I searched through my stain samples to see what stain would work best.  I chose Special Walnut as the color for the floor.  I stained the floor very lightly so that the floor wouldn’t be too overly dark.  After about 5-10 minutes I rubbed off the excess stain with a rag and then let it dry thoroughly overnight.  The next day, I sanded the floor and tried to create worn spots on the floor by excessively sanding patches.  I decided not to gloss the floor so as to maintain the impression of a very worn floor and was concerned that applying gloss would ruin this illusion.

I tested the fit of the floor in the box, and held off on gluing it in place because I wanted to add electricity.  My plan for electrifying the room was to have a light in the bathroom area, a desk lamp, table lamp in the left corner, and a light in the hall that would be behind the back wall.

My plan with the electricity also involved figuring out how to arrange it so that the lights could be controlled independently.  I tried to come up with different ways to do this, but nothing seemed to work mainly because I wanted to use tape wire.  The only way that I came up with how to control the lights was to install a switch for each light or as I eventually decided every couple of lights.  The bathroom and hall lights would be controlled by one switch each and then the desk and table lamps would be controlled with one switch.

Tape Wiring

Once the tape wire was installed along with the switches, I painted over any of the wiring that might show by painting over it with gesso.  Incidentally, I left out the wiring for the bathroom light on purpose.  It would be put in place later, after the back wall was installed. 

After painting the Raw Sienna Acrylic on the lower part of the walls

After the gesso had dried, I painted the lower 3 ¾” of the walls with a faux wood finish using a coat raw sienna acrylic.  This I let dry completely and then added another coat of a mixture of burnt umber acrylic paint and a gel staining medium.  By applying the stain in the same direction as the paint it created a faux wood look.  This staining method I duplicated on the back wall that was made out of mat board.

Next after the paint was dry I wallpapered the walls with miniature ceiling paper that had a stuccoed texture.  This wallpaper was to have a smoky, well used appearance.  To achieve this according to the article’s instructions, it needed to be covered with a light coat of raw sienna and gel medium mixture by brushing it on and then wiping it off.  This technique turned out to be more difficult than it was described.  I found it difficult to get the paint and gel medium mixture to spread evenly.  Wiping the mixture off seemed to really mean scrub off even though that wasn’t what the instructions stated.  However, the end product seemed to turn out well enough.  The walls looked a bit darker than I remember, but since I didn’t have a color picture of the finished project, and was only going by my memory of what the office walls looked like I feel as though perhaps it’s my memory that’s faulty and not my painting of the walls.

I glued the floor to the inside of the room box once the paint on the wallpaper had dried.  Then I began cutting and painting the wood strip that would be baseboards and trim for the windows, walls, and door.  This trim was then glued to the back wall around the windows, door, and along the bottom to form a baseboard.

After the trim on the back wall was installed, I began trying to make faux hinges, door knob, and mail slot.  At first, I wasn’t sure how I would accomplish making these things.  My idea at first had been to just buy the needed items, but as it turned out I didn’t want to spend the money, so I decided to try and create them myself from scratch.  I measured the hinges on my front door and scaled down the measurements to 1/12^th scale.  Then I measured a miniature doorknob that I had on one of my other miniature structures.  The mail slot was a little trickier because I didn’t have ready access to one.  I have one on my door at work, but had no interest in making a trip over to my office just to measure the mail slot.  Instead I just winged it and came up with measurements that I thought would be to scale with the room and door. 

Round toothpicks turned out to be the perfect diameter to use as hinges and were cut to the needed length.  The mail slot was cut out of a piece of cardboard as was the door plate for the door knob.  A small key hole or impression of a key hole was poked into the cardboard.  The end of a dowel was sanded into a rounded shape and then cut to the depth needed for a door knob.  Another narrower dowel was added so that the door knob wouldn’t be flush against the door plate.  All of the pieces for the doorknob including the doorplate were glued together and then the hinges, mail slot, and door knob were painted with gold metallic acrylic paint.  Once the paint was dried the door hardware was installed on the office door.

The instructions called for adhering a piece of glass to the back side of the inner wall and after adhering the letters on the door’s window applying several coats of frosted window paint to create a frosted appearance.  My idea was to instead adhere a piece of frosted acrylic plastic that I’d purchased for another project to the back of the inner wall and the lettering would be printed on a clear laser label which would be put over the door’s window opening.

This however didn’t work out.  The label wasn’t large enough to cover the entire window and so I wound up copying the lettering onto tracing paper that I glued to the area around the door’s window.  I glued an unlettered piece of tracing paper over the other windows so everything would match.  The only hitch was that the door lettering was exposed and could be smudged.  To prevent this, I glued another piece of acrylic over the tracing papered covered openings.

 

After the glue dried, I glued the wall in place along the long side of the floor about 2 inches from the back of the room box.  Once this was dried, I glued the partition wall in place to the right of the door.

I mitered the ends of the 1/2” square strip wood that would trim the top interior walls of the room box and then painted the pieces to match the other wood in the room.  I used clear tacky glue to glue each piece in place.  Then cut and painted the baseboard and wainscoting trim to match.  This was also glued in place using clear tacky glue.

I cut another piece of 1/2” square strip wood to fit under the top molding on the right side wall down to the floor and painted it as well.  This I glued in place to the right wall to be in line with the partition wall.  This would define the area where the bathroom sink and medicine cabinet will be.  The plan is for this area to be a washroom for the office.

The semi-finished office

Next on my to do list is to fill in any gaps in the top molding using a dark brown polymer clay, to add the third light switch to the back of the room box for the washroom light. Lastly, I’ll work on making furniture and accessories for the detective office.