Family, Cleaning

Mom and I spent the loveliest afternoon at DS Shirley and DBIL Grahame's home. Grahame's DS and BIL are here from New Zealand and other members of that side of the family were there. Great visit!!! Had a bit of a giggle with Grahame's DS Katheryne when I presented her with one of my miniature City of St.Albert books as a souvenir of their visit. (Told her it would be easy to pack in her luggage.) Then Shirley brought up my miniature of Dad's workshop to show her some of my work.

Second youngest sister Carol might be coming out for a visit tomorrow so I've been trying to get some of the cleaning finished.

So I thought I would get rid of the "New Orleans" house:

Two years ago when we had the silent auction of Joyce's projects, I got an incomplete "New Orleans" house (I think it was from a NAME House Party) for $1.00 or $2.00. It's built most from foamcore and some light plywood.

When I got it, I thought it had possibilities but I found it had doors/stairs leading to nowhere and windows on the outside that had solid walls behind them...

Some of the extra wallpaper, etc., that came with it...

The beautiful 'wrought iron' that came with it.

Thought I might be able to salvage this piece of flooring but the heat that was required to 'unglue' it warped it too badly for it to be saved..

Couldn't save this flooring either.

Did manage to save all this trim from the outside of the second floor.

One of the things I loved about this house was the storage drawer under this rom

There were a lot of doors and stairs leading to nowhere.

Incredible amount of doors and trim that I was able to salvage as I took the piece apart!!

The base of the stairs on the bottom right.

This is going in the garbage momentarily but I really wanted you to see these incredible stairs! If you scroll to the top of the blog, you can see how they were closed in. Here you can see how they were made of cut and folded foamcore and supported by the stringers along the back wall. How wonderful!!

This is one of those "LITTLE" projects that took forever. Well, not exactly forever but almost three hours!

BUT, on the other hand, I did manage to salvage a whole pile of great trims,doors and other pieces from it. (And it will take me even more time to clean them up to use them - BUT since these things aren't readily available here, it's probably worth the time and effort.)

On the OTHER hand, I could have thrown the whole thing in a garbage bag and taken it out to the bin. two minutes!

YES, I think it was worth it. VBG