While stepping away from the repainted cabinet for a few days, I decided to move forward on building the Rose Garden Tea Room itself. At this point, the next steps were to build the roof & to decide exactly how I wanted to build the exterior shell.
I knew that I didn't want to entirely connect the whole exterior together. I'd like to be able to really change the furniture & accessories around for holidays & as I make other tiny projects, so it was very important to me that the whole of the interior was fully accessible. To that end, after mulling it over, I decided to make the front bay window area (where the door & front windows are) removable. Since the other half of the frontage is already open, keeping that unattached from the rest of the building would ensure full accessibility.
So I set about building that front part, using the footprint of the floor as a guide for attaching the frontage pieces together:
This part was fairly straightforward, and as you can see, the pieces came together easily & fairly nicely. There was minimal fiddling involved to get them matched up & looking good.
Next I started putting the roof on, going from the patio-side roof piece first, then putting the two sides on that were at the back on the door-side of the build.
It was tricky to get the two aligned that make that peaked roof to the left look good, & even though they do look good, I had the feeling that something about this was amiss.
And sure enough, there's a HUGE gap at the top peak between the front & the back:
Yup, there's a 5/8" (1.58 cm) separation between the peak at the front & the ends at the back. Turns out, when I glued the very back of the structure onto the base, I did it by eye instead of buying an L square to make sure it was squared up & the back is canted backwards very slightly. It's also epoxied so solidly onto the base that I'm honestly not sure I could remove it to start over without destroying part of it. Not to mention that taking these pieces apart tends to rip sections of the blue paint & I would have to dismantle the whole thing (if there's one thing I wish this kit came with, it would be a small pot of the blue paint that covers the structure, for touch-ups).
Lesson learned: always use a level to build. Also, I learned from a lovely person on Instagram, Malene's Dollhouse (who also has a delightful Etsy shop! I've purchased one of her exquisite baskets & it will be featured in a future post) told me that there are a number of reviews/videos on Amazon for this particular dollhouse that describe better ways to build the roof. Also seems to be some videos on YouTube.
If you're thinking of buying this little beauty for yourself (& I do recommend it overall) do I say & look up ways of building that roof online (& buy a square!). Since I DIDN'T learn that valuable bit of info before getting to this point, I'm going to have to engineer a different solution. Stay tuned to see how I fixed this gap...