The Birchfield House by Sid Cooke is my biggest dollhouse. I got the kit on summer 2008 and it took me several years to get everything done.
Here is the family from the Kitty and Riddick story, looking at their new house, which is just an online picture at this point.
This picture shows the floors and inner walls of the Birchfield house. As you can see, it is about one third wider than the Aurinkoinen (Sunny) house I had built earlier. I decided to do this much assembly before painting. This way, it was easier to see what color goes where, but there was still fairly easy access to all parts.
I wasn't going to buy any wallpaper, but as I was looking for dollhouse lights, I found the Maple Street web site. They had that Mackintosh Floral light (on the left), which I just had to have. So, I decided to see what else they had and happened to open the wallpaper section. What would be more appropriate for Kitty's house than a room with kitten wallpaper? The wooden parts and rest of the lights are from the same place where I ordered the house from.
Some of the wallpapers are in place here. The backwall was in place only temporarily as there was still a lot to do before it could be glued in place. All the floors (except in the hallway) have primer, 2 coats of paint, and 2 coats of varnish. The ceilings are all painted off-white.
The back wall is in place here. The staircase has three coats of paint and one coat of varnish. Varnish wasn't absolutely necessary, but as the paint had matte surface, it could have been difficult to clean the walls when necessary and so I decided that some protection would be a good idea. The floor tiles got a coat of varnish as well. The sheet looked nice as it was, but it scratched very easily. It was really hard to get the ends of house in place, because there were so many parts that had to go into the grooves at the same time, but I managed to do it.
Here is Riddick inspecting the unfinished house. Actually, this was a test on how low the doors were compared to him. The third picture shows a cupboard I made for the kitchen.
Here is the front wall with first coat of primer, and the house with lights installed.
Here are some details. The wall hanging is just a piece of interesting fabric I found. I treated the edges with FrayStop to keep them neat.
View of the stairs. First from the bottom floor and second from the middle floor. The carpet is made of similar fabric as the wall hanging, but the patterns in this one were more suitable for the stairs as you can see from the second picture. The fabric had these rectangular shapes filled with different patterns and they were just the right size, so that each step has a different pattern both in its horizontal and vertical part.
Some kitchen furniture and details.
More lighting fixtures and a Bodo Hennig chair, which is actually 1/10 scale, but fits here just fine.
Varnishing doors and windows isn't something I find relaxing, so I usually do it all at once to get it over with. I used two kinds of tinted varnish for these. The yellow (that's supposed to be birch color) parts are for the Birchfield house and the reddish (mahogany) ones for the Cupboard House.
More views on the staircase and inner doors.
