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Front decoration. Still detail to do, but getting there.

Further on with the interior.

6 feet end to end. Take me a life time to 'finish'.

Front - Mock up 2

The frech windows need to be made. There is nothing on the market that looks anything like the shop house windows.

The front - design and 1st mock up.

The line design. After looking at loads of shop fronts, settled on this type.

With a little help from Gek, worked up a colour scheme. Looking very Peranakan. But can I turn this into the real deal??? I have already decided to make the pillars and decorations removeable. That confident!!!!

Not finding it easy. Getting the right tone and balance in the colours is going to be hit and miss. This attempt is already history!!!

We found these iron-on-embrodery designs in a Singapore craft shop. Cracking moulded plaster design, don't you think

Air well.

The stairs banisters are finished as are the louvered shutters.

The shutters have had 5 coats of paint!!! Could not make up my mind on the colours, see. And what with the fiddly hinges and tiny screws, this will probably turn out to be the longest single job on the whole project. To be fair, I did decide to glue two shutters back to back to make them look right. As supplied the louvers are only cut on one side. Not good enough for this project!! This meant waiting for my mates Ruth and Richard to bring me in extra supplies from the UK. Hinges I got from Diaso. They are parts in bonzi garden furniture. T'was a lot cheaper than getting them from a miniature supplier, even if I have ended up with 18 sets of sling doors!!!. Needed 36 individual hinges and 72 tiny screws. I made a simple template to cut the hinge recesses so that if the louvers are taken off at anytime there will be no problem matching louver to the right fame.

All the shutters open!!!! But the effect is worth the effort, I think.

Gek did the art work for me. absolutely hopeless when it comes to colouring in!! Love this fish. All the plaster works look great.

Air Well

Still working on the airwell. Taking hours. Gek has helped by painting the plaster works.

Gek does a much more arty job than I ever could.

Air Well

Air well partially complete. The white panels need art work. Not my strength.

85 tiles on the stairs. Getting the acrylic paint to stick to the air dry clay has been a challenge. Especially if the tiles are sand papered first. Also found that using water and a little white paint helps the adhesion.

The house is becoming an art gallery. Finding the right kind of period furniture has failed, so going for plan B....modern day shophouse restoration as an art gallery/shop.

Stairs

Stairs base constructed. The treads will be dark varnished wood and the uprights, tiles.

1 cm square tiles. Lots of them. Making things by hand, I have to accept some inconsistencies between the tiles. Difficult for an engineer to do!!!! Mind-set on precision and machine like repeatability. Tell myself that I am trying to create the IMPRESSION of a Paranakan house, NOT create an actual house. Difficult!!!!!

Ceilings

First ceiling finished with new lights fitted.

Vase and flowers on the piano, gift from Alice.

Air well floor tiles.

Art Friend has a series of paper punches to punch out your own paper stencils. Most are quite small and simple in design but recently arrived in stock are these 22 mm square ones. Perfect for the air well floor tiles. The stencil is punched into sticky labels which are then stuck onto the blank tile. Acrylic paint was used to create the pattern on the tile. Note: punch the stencil out with the backing paper towards the punch, otherwise the bits of paper stick to the punch which in turn sticks in the die. The tiles were made in the same way as the larger terracotta floor tiles but using white air drying modelling clay.

Doors and windows

The doors and windows are lined with 9 mm x 2 mm wooden strips. They have been given the same treatment as the floor boards, so nice and dark. Looks really classic against the pale blue. Making the doors and the windows should be straight forward once I have the designs. Trip to Malacca next week should sort that out.

Flooring

The first story floors are boarded. Usually black lacquered or dark stained and varnished. An interesting feature are a couple of spy holes in the floor to see who is down stairs. One over outside the front door and one over the front room. The small trap doors to the spy holes were covered with a carpet to hide from visitors!!! I used contact glue to fix the boards.

The ground floor was tiled with "large, rust coloured clay tiles layed in a diagonal pattern" in early houses. Fancy patterned glazed tiles were introduced later in the period. I am using air-dry clay from Art Friend to make 2inch square, 3mm thick pieces. The clay dries a bit too light, so they are stained with Behandla water based stain from Ikea and finished with Ronseal water based varnish. See, very green we are!!

New use for cling film. Mould liner. Line the the moulds with the film, squash in the clay, place a second film over the clay and roll with the pin. Very clean!!! 500 grms of clay makes 30 tiles. The house needs 180 tiles. Each moulding, 3 tiles at a time takes 10 to 15 mins. Do the maths!!!!

Update 1

Got the floor tile manufacture down to 30/hr. Got better skilled at the job and introduced better method of working. More efficient too. Now getting 33 tiles per 500 grm pack.



Update 2



The clay shrinks approx 6% when dried.


Before laying the tiles permanently, I drew a series of 45 deg lines across the bare floor. The tiles are not symmetrical enough to use spacers, as you would do on a full scale job. So had to rely on line of sight. I used grouting power from Diaso to fix as well as grout the tiles. I decided not to colour the grout as I am pretty sure they would not have had colouring available 60/70 years ago.

Wiring Up

After the building case is painted and before the flooring and ceilings can be finished, the copper strips for the electrics have be layed. Each room will have it's lights switched. With the style of houses and the period, the electricity was retrofitted and nearly always just lighting. So easy job. On other house I have done, laying the strips can be quite complicated with wall sockets.

Spotted this lamp on Emerald Hill,

Found a model at Dolls House Emporium. Magic.

Floor boards

21mm by 3mm strips of soft wood. The wood was bought from Daiso, a $2 Japanese store in Singapore. For that you get 3 strips. Each strip has been stained 4 times with Indian Rosewood stainer and brushed with 6 coats of clear gloss varnish. Long job. Next time I will go for a darker stain and choose the best side of the wood. Mind you, I suspect that the real boards were originally quite rough.

Finds

First up has to be these moulds used for making traditional Chinese cakes. Sock Hoon's mother has a collection of these moulds which were hand made in China and could be 50 to 60 years old. And guess what. They are the right 1/12th scale for doing the plaster reliefs on Peranakan houses!! Result. Imprinted in air drying clay and painted up these are going to look brilliant as part of the houses decoration. Many thanks to Sock Hoon and her mum for letting me borrow them.

Next are these bits from Daiso, a Japanese $2 store here in Singapore. Every single item in the shop cost $2 Sing. These items are part of a collection for bonsai gardens, again, near as damn it 1/12th scale. Amazing what turns up where!!

Shell Painting

Base shell completed with the roof space still to make. And special stands (wheeled shoe racks) make it much easier to work on the house. The idea of two separate sections is to allow the house to be 'folded' up. With a terraced house, the side walls are normally hidden and blank. I am hoping that by 'folding' the back section against the front, it will make for a more interesting external appearance to the model. Time will tell!! A picture might help too!!!

Peranakans' love bright, vibrant colours. I have gone for the colours used on the Neil Road house. The house restorers have done an extensive chemical analysis on the old layers of paint used on and in the house. The original exterior paint turned out to be this really bright blue and the inside walls were a pale powder blue. Besides these excellent reasons, blue is my favourite colour!! 6 coats to get the depth of colour.

Start

The scale is 1 inch to 1 foot. This is the standard scale used by the the Americans from where a lot of the doll house miniatures originate. The basic shell to the house is made from 9mm or 3/8th inch plywood. The plywood should have as many plies as available and in terms of quality in descending order, use

• Marine ply
• Beech faced ply
• External ply (used by the construction industry for temporary walls, concrete moulding etc)
• ordinary ply.

The quality sets the stability of the finished model. The base is made from 1.5 x 7/8 th inch hard wood. Strangely, the wood shop I have been using has the ply sheets in imperial sizes, 8 ft x 4 ft x 3/8 in.