Castle Starcaster - Week Ten

My main goal for the week was to finish off the halls downstairs by adding cornicing/coving, trimming around the dividing arch and finishing the fireplace. Needless to say, I've finished none of the above. I did get close on the fireplace, but it still needs a little more work before it is glued in place and complete. The fireplace is made mostly of thick cardboard with an opening cut out at the bottom. Above the opening is a strip of corncie/coving (depending on where you live) ontop of which sit thirteen premade wood turned posts supporting another piece of cornice topped off by a length of fancy wood trim. The entire item was glued together, then painted. It seemed like a good idea at the time until I had to try and paint behind the turned posts. It wasn't going to work, so I still have to paint some thin card to match and slide it in behind the posts to finish the fireplace.

While making fireplaces, I also made one for the bedroom. The back and base are made of brick board (MDF with brick shapes cut into it). The sides are rectangular posts of balsa wood onto which are mounted some fancy corbel brackets. It is topped off with a hood of cardboard covered in a textured gold paper. The assembled fireplace was painted in soft white, the same colour as the walls will eventually be painted, then dirtied up with some black paint. The gold hood also had some black paint added and mostly rubbed off to tone down the gold.

When not working on fireplaces, I was working on floors. In the bedroom, I used popsicle type sticks to lay straight, narrow floorboards accross the room. Next door in the "centre room" I used the same sticks in a more complicated pattern. This represents my first attempt at any type of parquet floor and I'm quite pleased with the result. Too bad I forgot to allow for the fireplace on the side wall in the floor design. At the moment that is another problem in the "later" basket. Once the floors were laid, gaps between the boards were filled with some wood filler, the floors were sanded and given a couple of coats of my mix of wood stain.

With the floor in the centre room laid and stained, there was no reason not to start on the panelling for the walls, so panel the walls I did. As with the low panelling downstairs, the panelling consists of 0.8mm thick balsa wood sheets glued to the walls with thicker, centimetre wide strips added over the top in a grid pattern. The panels aren't quite finished due to a short fall in the amount of strips I had on hand. I could cut my own, but then they wouldn't be straight, so the walls are waiting for me to head out to the shops before they'll be finished. I still don't know what the purpose of this room will be, hence it's current, undescriptive monkier of "centre room". The Library and Bedroom flank it on either side, the entry hall is directly below and the sorcerer/sorceress' work room/study is directly above it, but what happens in this room is anybody's guess. Oh well, at least it looks good.

On an entirely unrelated note, take a look at this:

My order from Betterworldbooks.com has arrived. Did I go a little overboard?