House meets basement

Is it love at first sight? Not really. My first, spontaneous, thought was Ough?

Today is the first day the house and basement finally met. The basement is both deeper and wider than the house. But symmetry is not all in life. There is more. The basement, without the front, makes the house look HUGE. Well, I have not seen many houses so practically every house is the biggest I've ever seen IRL. A basic issue is the grey base that goes with the house, it is glued on (my father did a very good job) and wont budge. And it's a bit to late in the evening to venture into battle with hammers. The operation will have to wait. But then the house will drop maybe 2-3 cm and it will be better fit.

Gertrude shows her colours!

Gertrude was very severe when she told me that the wallpaper in the servants quarter would not do, too dreadfully boring. She is the mistress of the house and responsible for the welfare of the people employed. Lucky for me, I went shopping yesterday and found a striped paper intended for scrapbooks. Gertrude approved. And she was right, it looked a bit more cheerful now. Gertrude reminded me that the servants were not slaves, they could very well murder their masters in the beds if they were not happy about terms of conditions. Oh dear!

And here is another bad picture of more bricks. Funny, I had never done any bricks before I started this project, and now bricks seems to be everything I do. The bricks on this particular picture is darker, I forgot to add orange when I painted the cartons... Or I can say that the clay they used for building this wall was different from the rest, from up north or something.

This is the last work I will do on my basement for a very long time. I will go work in my home town as a museum guide, living at my parents house. I have my two houses there. The yellow house, where the basement belongs to. And the the red cottage. I will bring my tools along with me and intend to do a lot of work. It's been ages since I did anything on them and I have lots of plans! Until Sunday, happy midsummer!

Plank away!

Work started today with cutting coffee stirrers with a scissor. And voilà!

Some green paint and I finally had my plank. Second picture is a blurry image of the finished result. The stairs down to the basement from the street were originally wooden, but I covered the steps with egg carton that was painted to resemble stone. I then continued the plank to cover up the empty space underneath. The edges though are a bit rough. When I find proper material I will make some bannister, don't want the servants and tradespeople falling down and breaking all kinds of limbs.

I like how the sun shines on the stairs on the third picture, so I wanted to share it.

I have to use my camera on my phone, since my digital camera distorts the colours...

Construction craze!

The construction worker strikes again! The basement is semi-assembled. It's wallpapered with some simple, yet structured, paper. Nothing too fancy for the poor servants. White, with a hint of grey, for the kitchen area and light yellow for the servants room.

Work on the patio is slowly progressing. I am not pleased the stones, yes I have never painted stones before so it's quite the challenge. The wooden bar (behind the empty space where the stairs will be placed) is the base I will use to make a green plank. Later I will hang out the washing and let ivy climb over my bricks.

Bricks and stones

The dressing of my basement is almost done! My first attempt making bricks from eggcarton. It was quite fun, I've started asking my friends to save their cartons for me so I am expecting to be the owner of quite a large stock in a few weeks. For grout I used a filler that I mixed with colour, a very very messy but satisfying process. So the façade is almost done, windows need to be painted - again. Sticky fingers covered in paint need to stay away from nicely painted windows! More grey "stone" is going to be added, to create a base. I only had enough eggcartons left for the big piece...

I started work on the patio as well, plain stones that I painted using my fingers.

Finally a basement!

Today my basement from England arrived! For more than ten years I wished for a basement to my house, and now it's finally here. Even though the rest of the house is 300 km away... I have been looking at different basement before I decided on this model. It is a few cm wider than my house, but I don't think it will show. That much. But I was surprised about the size of the actual basement. Sure, I measured the width, but not the depth of my house. I am determined it will work. My boyfriend was quite curious about the size of the package I brought home from the post and was keen to know how it worked out. So since, he is an engineer I let him help out to construct the front part. "But isn't this your hobby?" he asked.