Hints and Tips

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I am including here a few hints and tips that I think may be useful if you are doing any of the following for the first time.

WALLPAPERING:
I wallpapered each of my houses as I went along, it is much easier to do this than leave it to the end, I used household border adhesive to stick the paper, applied with my finger, which worked very well. The paper does stretch a bit so you have to watch for that. I did find that the wallpaper sheets varied in size and sometimes there wasn't enough width to go all the way across without a join so make sure you measure everything carefully so that you have enough paper. One sheet will not necessarily be enough for a room, which is annoying to find out once you've started to cut it and even more so if you've bought it mail order and have to send away for just one more sheet!

LIGHTING:
I didn't have much of an idea about soldering so I got my husband to do that part of the lighting the first time round. On my second house, however, I used another lighting method, where you fed the wires through the back of the house and plugged all the individual lights into a multi socket, no soldering needed. It's not as tidy but at least I could say it was all my own work!

DRILLING:
I managed the drilling, although I didn't find that the little hand drill held the bits very tightly and they did wobble. I put nails in to help hold the first house together as it suggests in the instructions. However the problem I've found with this is that the nail heads now show down the sides of the house. I haven't overcome this yet, I need to paint some climbing plants up the walls. With house number two I decided to forget the nails. The glue is very firm and it feels quite rigid, so unless you are going to be moving it about a lot I think it's OK.

PAINTING:
This was OK, you do need to do it all before sticking the pieces together. My first kit had plastic windows and door which made that part easy and a very basic staircase. The second, however, had all wooden windows which had to be painted, which was quite fiddly. The door already had its windows in so it was very hard to keep the paint off them, in hindsight I should have used masking tape. The stairs in this second house had 2 flights and loads of individual spindles, which took quite a bit of painting.

STAIRS:
This was very simple on the 'Classical' house but one of the most time consuming parts of the second kit that I did. Gluing the spindles onto the stairs was quite hard, it's amazing how difficult it is to get them to stand in a straight line. You do need to keep on checking that they are lined up or else they wont fit into the groove in the underside of the banister rail. I had to remove some of mine more than once to get them to fit neatly

SKIRTING BOARDS:
If you are putting in skirting board then buy the packs with the mitred corners. I bought the straight ones the first time and found it hard to cut the corners neatly at angles. It meant that I had to use filler which was hard in such a small space. It is easier to join on the straight which I did second time round.