What house to build was a dilemma all in itself. Much research in 1998 went into locating and deciding just what kind of house I wanted to take a year to build. Well enough said. My late mother insisted on buying me the kit and so a trip to the store and I was off to the races. In the ideal world it was to take me a year to accomplish. In the real world it is now 2013 and I’m possibly 1/3 complete. I have a lot of work to do and I shall use this space to commit to finishing the Garfield.
I will post some photos of the early stages of the building. I had computer problems and did manage to loose a lot of photos except for a few that I printed many years back when I first started building. Did not have digital camera in the beginning and did not keep back ups of some of early digital images I had. For shame, for shame!
And so I will try to recreate the various stages of the building process, albeit through short, very short descriptions and detail using a few photos which I have managed to find. The Garfield was the house I most felt would have all the rooms I could possibly ever want to build and decorate. The many different rooms include on the bottom floor, a Sitting (parlor) room, Dining room, Kitchen and Foyer. On the second floor there is a Master bedroom, a second bedroom, which I will be calling the girls room and a bathroom. And on the top floor, another bedroom, I will call the boy’s room, another large bedroom to be considered as a den/office, an open area which will be a craft / and sewing room. And then in the magnificent Turret which I will turn into my art room. Well, there is a lot of work ahead and a lot of planning. Perhaps a four room house would have been the best way to go…not for me. Here we go!
The plan from the beginning was to have as much Victorian detail as possible but I also wanted to have a lot of Christmas going on. Something else I knew I would not have…dolls! Nope! No dolls! Many years later after finding just the right dolls, and my house will have a mother (me) which I found, a father – I’m still looking for, a son and a daughter. And the theme also now set to a Victorian home, belonging to a modern family on Christmas Eve. This allows me to have Victorian details with many antique finds, but because it is owned by a modern family, I will be able to have computers, phones, and other modern day items. Christmas Eve, just gives me the opportunity to have all kinds of Christmas decorations and presents an opportunity for a story line as well.
So, open up the kit, read briefly through the instructions and get on with it. Well, more like forget the instructions, let”s just build it because I know I will be modifying, upgrading, building and rebuilding before I go to far.
I laid out the foundation. That didn’t go to badly. Strait forward and made sure that I had a surface big enough up which to build it. Yikes! It sure was a lot bigger than I thought. The measurements translated into the actual surface coverage did not relate. However, now I was committed to this giant and so on with it.
I hope to find some old hard copy pics to upload one day of the very early process.
For now let me show you some of the pics which I did find and was able to scan. A million apologies for the poor pics.