Around 1999, I started assembling an "Aster Cottage" kit, by Corona. My plans were to turn it into a quilt shop. The cottage contains two rooms: a main floor and a loft. I planned to have a shop area on the main floor, and a workroom/classroom area in the loft. After some assembly, it was set aside until 2005.
I made a few changes to the kit. The first thing I did was to make the walls taller. The way the kit was designed, the area under the loft was 6.5 inches tall, which represents 6.5 feet in real size. The doors were only 5.5 inches tall. The ceiling under the loft was too low, and the doors were too short. So, I added 1.5 inches to the height of the walls by cutting and gluing pieces of basswood to the bottoms of the walls. This also raised the fireplace hearth off the floor to a nice height for sitting.
I also decided to not put stairs in the cottage, since they would have taken up too much room. The floor area of the main floor only measures around 15 x 12 inches, which is pretty small for a shop as it is.
These pictures show the cottage partially assembled. The walls are just taped together at this point.
I wired the cottage. Fluroscent lights are attached to beams under the loft. The fireplace is covered with stones made from plaster.
Doors are hung with hinges, and the walls are glued together:
Wiring was done with the 'hard wire' method. I cut grooves in the walls to house the wires. They will be covered with stucco.
I replaced all the timeberframes with ones I cut from basswood. after attaching the timeberfrmes, I put stucco on the walls. I put stucco on the top sections of the front and back walls, before attaching the roof, since there was no way I could reach under the eaves to apply stucco after the roof was in place. Doing the stucco was fun! Messy, yes, but fun! I used drywall spackle for the stucco.
I had assembled the roof as one unit. I trimmed the edges with veneer, to help cover the fact that they were made of crappy plywood. I added a piece of wood to the top of the ceiling to make a place to install lights. The wires run over the side and are hidden inside the eaves, and the wires eventually run through the fireplace, where they meet up with other wires in the 'foundation'.
I textures and painted the walls and ceiling where I could, before attaching the roof to the house. I used 'dollhouse stucco' to do the texture. All the walls in the cottage are white, since the things in the shop will be colorful, and I didn't want the walls to compete with the furnishings.
A giant cat! Inspector Pooh, peeking in the attic window before I added the window 'glass'.
After the roof was attached, I finished texturing and painting the corners. Then I built a railing for the loft, since I didn't want to use the one that came in the kit. Since I wanted the railing to meet safety standards, my railing was taller than the one provided in the kit. This presented a problem the in area where the railing met the back wall. I adjusted the end post so that it had a cut out to meet the slope of the roof.
