Starting on the William and Mary House!

I've been planning like a fiend and sketching madly for the last couple of days, and I have my plans pretty well worked out for the W&M House.  Yesterday we finally went to the lumberyard to get the first lot of materials!

I'm following Derek Rowbottom's basic plans and techniques for the country house in his excellent book, Making Georgian Dolls' Houses, but I'll be making a few alterations.

His original plans make a two storey plus attic building 38" long  and 16" deep, with six main rooms and four attic rooms.  I'm modifying it to make a 48" long building with seven main rooms and three attic rooms -- I'm adding a single storey addition on the ground floor for a kitchen, so that I can have a separate entrance hall (in Rowbottom's original, the front door comes right into the dining room :)


From left to right on the ground floor:  kitchen, dining room, entrance hall, parlour
From left to right on the first floor:  bedroom, library, blue and white room
From left to right in the attic:  servants' bedroom, hall, children's bedroom

I bought a 4' x 2' piece of good one side birch plywood, 3/8" thick.  I also bought two 2' x 8' sheets of 1 inch thick medium density polystyrene foam, since it's the material Rowbottom recommends for side and back walls.  I'm very curious to see what it's like working with this material, because everything I've built so far has been plywood all the way.  If nothing else, it should make the model lighter!

David cut the plywood to size this morning for the base:

We then made an underframe from .75" square pine and glued and clamped it in place on the underside of the base.

Here's the base on the dining room table so I can mark out the different flooring types that I'll need.  The kitchen is going to be tiled, the dining room wood (I'll scribe and stain this nice plywood), the entrance hall will be marble and the parlour wood.

Here's two short lengths of the builders' foam (we had to break each 8' length into two bits to fit it in the car :))

It's got a very useful rabbet on each edge which will mean that I'll be able to get a nice join on the base:

It's not as pretty as flowers, but I've finally started this project and I couldn't be more excited!