Dollhouse Reconstruction Update

Those who follow me know that I have been painstakingly (if somewhat half-heartedly) restoring my dollhouse from when I was a child.

This weekend I decided to stop procrastinating and tackle a bit which was holding me back: reassembling the octagonal roof from the tower.

The tower was smashed when something heavy fell on it and the removable roof broke into pieces.  A few months ago, I reshingled the triangular roof sections.  (Original sections shown at top and newly shingled version down below.)

 

Reshingling all of the roof sections wasn't difficult.  Time consuming but not difficult.  Figuring out how to glue them all together into the proper orientation ... that was difficult.  I couldn't figure out how to do it.  There's an octagonal inset which forms the interior base but getting all those individual pieces to balance together was more than I could figure out.

 

Since brooding wasn't getting me anywhere, I decided to bite the bullet and just give it a try.  Maybe this would be one of those tasks which seem really intimidating at first but then turns out to be easy.

 

For the record: it wasn't.

 

Three Babylon 5 episodes and most of Nausicaa And The Valley Of The Wind to finally achieve this:

 

 

 

I tried holding a piece in place at the proper angle until the wood glue dried (over an hour) but as soon as I removed the support, the glue cracked and the pieces fell apart.

 

I tried balancing two and four pieces together at the apex, gluing popsicle sticks inside to act as a brace.  Same problem.

 

I tried using duct tape to tape all the segments together and then glue them to the base.  Apparently wood glue and particle board are the two things which duct tape will not stick to.

 

Finally, I tried using the paper join covers.  I glued all the segments together, let them dry and then tried to wrap the whole thing around the inset.  It didn't fit. 

 

This is the point where I indulged in some mental profanity.  I tried wrapping it again, trying different orientations and eventually, I found the right fit.  Then I had to hold it in place until the glue dried enough to keep it from splitting apart.

 

I finally got it together.  My next target of procrastination: the missing tiles from the side of the building.  I'm thinking I'm going to have to paint bristol board and toothpicks in order to get a rough facsimile and then hope it's not too obvious.