First side finished!

As it is Christmas time, I have managed to squeeze in several hours on the clapboarding, and have finished the first side including the dormer! You can really start to see what the house will look like when it is finished. I'm really pleased with it.

The side is wider than the clapboard sticks. This wasn't a problem for most of it as the board run is interrupted by the kitchen bay or by windows. Where a board runs completely across, I was careful to stagger the joins.

I am getting into a routine with this and it is going a bit faster. I cut the pre-painted board to size (using cardboard templates for complicated shapes like the stair window) with either clippers or an X-acto knive, daub some paint on the cut end, apply QuickGrab (and possibly Tacky Glue) along the reverse top and bottom edges of the board, let it all dry briefly, then apply it to the house. If it is QuickGrab, then just holding it with finger pressure for several seconds is sufficient. I did this whole side with about 2/3rds of a tube of QuickGrab.

Because I have exposed wiring on the outside, I couldn't use QuickGrab glue on all the boards (it would dissolve the wire insulation), so where the boards would cross a wire, I used Tacky Glue on that section. This meant having to do some clamping and letting glue dry before I could move on with some sections.

So far (touch wood) I am not worried about running out of clapboard as there looks to be loads still in the box. You can use up lots of short bits on all the complicated fussy cutting, so I don't feel that I am wasting very much.

Merry Christmas everyone! Hope Santa brought you lots of good minis.