Priming, Priming, and More Priming

Priming all of the pieces of wood that came with the kit may take the rest of my life.  Not really, I'm making progress.  Today I did the reverse side of all the pieces I primed yesterday, and the front of the wall liners, and various miscellaneous small pieces.

Primed Mini House pieces cover every available surface

After priming each piece, it has to be sanded to create a nice smooth surface to receive the paint.  The exterior walls are especially challenging, because they have milled clapboard siding, and each board has to be sanded separately.

Each "clapboard" needs to be sanded

You would think this would be tedious - I certainly would if you described it to me.  But somehow I enjoyed it. I sat outside on a folding chair, happily sanding away, listening to old cassette tapes of Styx and Boston and Billy Squier on the crappy boom box that my husband keeps in the garage that gets no radio reception and has a broken CD player. (Long overdue shout out to an old college boyfriend, who tried in vain to convince me that cassettes were crap and I should be buying CD's instead:  Mike, you were right!)

Today's musical selection is a song from the boom box today that I haven't heard in years:

Moving On to the Floors

Bob found plywood at Home Depot that was finished on both sides, so he cut the two replacement floors I needed.  The new floors are thicker than the original ones - I think Bob said it was about 1/16th of an inch.  Depending on how precise this whole kit is, the difference might possibly cause problems later in the building process.  Bob doesn't think it will be an issue. It doesn't matter, he can fix anything.

The next step was to stain and polyurethane all three floors.  It would be very difficult to do this properly after the house is built. I planned to do two coats of stain on the floor, but one coat of Min Wax in "Cherry" finish gave me the color I wanted - rich and not too dark.  I applied the stain with a piece of cheesecloth, and when it dried, I used a roller to coat the floors with polyurethane.     

After the polyurethane dried, I sanded the surfaces lightly with a fine sandpaper...

...then wiped the surface with a paper towel dampened with paint thinner to remove the dust and bring back the shine.

I repeated the process two more times, and was really happy with the result.  This will be one shiny, snazzy dollhouse floor!

New floors replace the floors that came with the kit - no stair holes!