#The 7 on the corner is the amount of builders i have and i'm a programmer so it starts at 0

[sapphire-draw]

There's a lot of things I want to work on but I don't have any time for them. So instead here's two scenes I had already fixed up beforehand for a friend.

Context: One of my builders praying to the God of Destruction without knowing it's actually Malroth. Shenanigans ensue.

Have a different altar to the Children of Hargon's because different religions can pray to the same god (game already makes the Children of Builder joke and I ran with it)

Also shoutout to that person in AO3 whom I totally stole the bird idea from. I couldn't find who when I went back to search for it. sorry. (if anyone knows I'll edit it in)

If I had more time I could try to fix the weird layout. sorry.

Malroth (human) also doesn't know the God of Destruction is actually Malroth. It's really funny trust me.

[smallerplaces]

The saga of the Dura-Craft Farm House FH500, part 1

All the Dura-Craft Farm House posts will be tagged Dollhouse Diaries, so you can avoid them if you like.

Last Sunday, we were at the Save-a-Pet Thrift in Valley Springs, where we saw this enticing box. It's the Dura-Craft Farm House FH500: "So authentic you can almost smell the hay!"

This is one of my two favorite 1:12 houses, which is reprehensible of me because the window sizing and placement is really not good. Back in 2008, I had bought a completed one, in fixer-upper shape, at an antique store in Phoenix for $60, but a lot happened in 2008, and it did not make some move or other. I'd been thinking that while there was no realistic way anything big from 2008 could have made it to 2024 with me, I wouldn't mind finding another one.

This one was $50. The proprietor of the thrift assured me that the kit is complete. She knew the guy who was trying to build it, and he just ran out of steam because it was complicated. Having built kit dollhouses with Dad over a long weekend, I scoffed. (Spoiler: I'm going to eat my words, unsauced and chewy.)

Obviously, I bought it. (Actually, Dad bought it for me while I protested that I have unspent birthday and Christmas money burning a hole in my wallet, but you get the idea.)

Upon reading the instructions, I found the stamped date when it was boxed up: October 7, 1982.

Dura-Craft was an Oregon furniture maker that started using scrap lumber for dollhouses in the late 1970s, with its kit production starting around 1978. From about 1978 through the 1980s was a huge boom period for dollhouse kits, with so many more brands and models than there are today. (Furniture variety peaks in the 2000s, though, go figure.)

The pictures on the box thus show some of the earliest Dura-Craft designs. Dad has built the San Franciscan (that's the one he built while Mom was dying, that she never got to put the furniture in, so you can figure we sold that because we couldn't stand the sight of it). I think he has the Southern Mansion kit in the attic, missing one floor piece, but I refuse to build a plantation house. I've never seen the Chateau!

The first step is to assemble the walls, as the walls are not sheets of plywood or MDF, the way most kits have always been. No, the walls are assembled from individual strips of plywood, about three fingers high, with milled siding. This here is three of the wood strips already glue together.

I am grateful for the milled siding, as dollhouse siding costs a fortune, and all DIY trash-to-treasure substitutes are an incredible amount of work to do. I admire and applaud people who make their own siding from stirring sticks or whatever, but I know I would do poorly at it.

What I'm not grateful for is that the prior builder had assembled the walls with hot glue. Never build a dollhouse shell with hot glue. Don't do it if the instructions say to *cough* Greenleaf *cough*. Definitely don't do it if the instructions say to use wood glue.

Hot glue puts a rubbery, flexible layer between the two surfaces glued together. There is fabulous if you're gluing silk flowers to a hat. It is not fabulous when you have wood that's intended for square, direct joins. The wall sections flap where the joins between strips are rubbery. Some are off-kilter because a rounded line of hot glue doesn't absorb down into the wood the way wood glue does. Many are simply breaking because hot glue ages faster and worse than wood glue.

So every time a join breaks, we have to pick hot glue debris out of the tracks on one side of the wood strip. Dad scrapes at it with a knife. I don't trust myself around sharp instruments, so I alternate between heating it with a microwaved napkin (damp in the center so it doesn't catch fire, but dry on the surface so it doesn't get the wood wet) and picking at it with my fingernails. We have tacitly agreed that we will not attempt to fix every join unless walls refuse to slide into their corner posts, many steps down the road.

There is a great deal of gluing and clamping involved. We're somewhere between halfway and 2/3 of the way through wall repairs, and I'm hoping we didn't jump the gun in gluing that gable back on.

Meanwhile, the box does come with a clear photo of the interior layout!

The interior walls are not optional -- every model of this house that I've seen without those walls has severely sagging floors. The floor edges balance on narrow wood sticks that don't give a lot of support.

I need to see how tall the rooms really are before making a firm decision on who gets this house. If ceiling height is reasonable for Arvin Lebec, who's a tall guy at 7", then it's his. If it runs short -- as sometimes happens with older kit houses -- then I may rebuy the couple intended as the original inhabitants the first time I bought this house: the Archie McPhee barista and hipster action figures.

Tomorrow is yet more wall-gluing. So many walls. So, so many walls.