The Dressmaker's Cottage: The Roof

Gah! The roof!  I was quite nervous about this step, as I've never made dormer windows before!  Caroline's tutorial on her blog, Cinderella Moments, didn't include instructions so I knew I just had to wing it, lol.

I started with the piece of foamboard, cut to size, with holes cut out for the window frames.  Caroline made hers, but I'm not so clever, and I bought mine ready-made on eBay.

The next step was to wallpaper the insides, as it is always easiest to do this on a surface flat on the table!  I used wallpaper on the bedroom side.

But on the bathroom side, Caroline made faux tin tiles using a glue gun.  I experimented with tin tiles but my glue gun is very cheap and nasty, and the glue comes out in big ugly globs, regardless of how carefully I apply, lol.

I knew I wanted something with texture, and when I was wiping up a min mess, I noticed the texture of the paper towel I was using and I figured it might look OK.

So, I ModPodged a piece to make it stiffer, and then glued it to the bathroom ceiling.  When it was dry, I painted it white.  I think it looks pretty good :-)

Then, using skinny sticks again, I framed the dormer window openings. 

Onto the dormers!

It took me a little bit of jiggling around with cardboard templates to come up with something that I thought looked OK for the window frames.







I traced the templates onto the foam board and cut them out, then glued them to the painted window frames.

I knew it would be difficult to access the interior of the dormers once they had been installed, so I took the opportunity to use spackle on all the joins, both inside and out.
 

Caroline's cottage has faux metal sheet roofing on the dormers and the bump out, so I attempted to approximate her roof using cardboard (from a cereal box) with the thin strips of the same cardboard across the top and along the sides.

I painted the cardboard grey and then used silver and off-white acrylic paint to add highlights.  I coated the sides of the dormers with Jo Sonja's Texture Paste, using a stippling brush to approximate a stucco finish.

I think they turned out OK for a first timer!

Now it was time for shingling!!  I was super nervous about this too, but I was glad that I was going to a run-down shabby chic look, rather than perfection, lol, so I just grabbed the shingles and tacky glue, and went to town (after undercoating the roof with brown paint).

The shingles I bought from eBay and they arrived pretty bashed up and broken.  Although I had enough for what I needed, pretty much none of them were the same size!  That forced me to just eye-ball the rows, while attempting to keep the bottoms of the shingles relatively straight!

The front almost done:

And the back piece (also made from a piece of foam board, cut to shape):

It's just roughly taped in place, but it's done finally.  Now for the painting of the shingles.  I can't decide what colour/s to use (or to stain them) so I think about it for a while :-)