Building ‘The End Terrace’ Dolls House (part 5 the front garden)

A view of a terrace house in red brick with a yellow front door and a double sash window. The house abuts a tall grey concrete wall with a fence above it that cuts off the end of the terrace row and the road. There is small front garden area with two stone gate posts, a very low wall and stone coping to the right with a hedge growing over it, and a taller brick wall to the left leading to the neighbouring house. Daisy is wearing a yellow high visibility work coat and black trousers and boots. She is standing on the pavement with a hand on a gatepost while looking at the 'For Sale' sign placed by an agent called 'Redi Bricks'. The whole scene is hand made at one twelfth scale.

With the road and external landscape underway in part 4 I turned my attention to the front garden area. Daisy will need somewhere to put her bins and recycling box.
I decided that the front garden would be minimal, as the house doesn’t have a bay window. Something like this would do.

The house front propped up on the workbench with a couple of wooden gate posts and a low wall, to the right of the gate posts, in bare wood.
Even a small house of this era needs big gate posts.

I made the gate posts and wall from wood salvaged from an old worktop. It was mostly table saw shaping with some hand cutting to chamfer the edges. The size, proportions and style are taken from my own Salford house built in 1873.

A close up view of the carved wood gate post and low wall at the front of the house.
All hand carved on the table saw!

The wall is also machine cut and then hand finished.
To form the brick courses I scribed along the grain with a flat screwdriver blade and then hammered the screwdriver blade across the grain to produce the vertical mortar joints.

A close up of the texture on the bare wood carved coping stones on the low wall.
A very low front garden wall and copings.

The texture on the top of the coping stones and the brick facings have been made by placing 40 grit abrasive on top and hammering on the back to impress the roughness of the grit into the surface of the wood. Again the size, proportions and style are copied from the same area of Salford as the gate posts.

A close up of the top of the carved wood coping stones. Showing the dressed edges and the raised textured centre panel.
That is a common enough looking stone!

Photographically this will be the area of the front garden and the public foot path. The path is quite narrow, only one slab wide, as might be found on a very minor road. I haven’t decided on the ground inside the garden at this stage so have been sketching out paving. There might be planting instead.

A overhead view of the dolls house front garden layout showing the house front, a step at the front door, the gate posts and the low wall.
That should work as a plan.

The posts and wall were painted and weathered with acrylic paints to give an aged appearance where the  main colours are from the lichen growth over the last 150 years.

The gateposts and low wall painted and weathered. The stonework is in a mottled dirty green of moss and lichen the brick wall is dirty dark red.
Weathering stones.

Likewise the brickwork is dull and dirty from road grime.

A close up of the side of a coping stone and the brickwork. The stone surface is streaked with colour.
Looking a suitable 150 years old.

At this stage I was debating between 3D printing a wrought iron railing and making a wooden picket fence that may have been installed in the 1960s or 70s.

A view along the length of the coping stones towards the gate post.
The top of the stones is nearly there.

But due to popular demand on Social Media it was decided that the wrought iron railing were removed for the war effort.

A close up of the coping stone with the stumps of wrought iron railings, cut off during World War two.
They took the iron railings to build Spitfires!

But how about next door?
It would seem that the neighbouring house had a different wall style, probably rebuild at a later date after the original was lost. The copings also don’t match and are probably reclamation yard specials, cheaper then big blocks of stone. It used up a remaining bit of the same timber and was processed in the same way. I do like those copings and have them on my back garden walls

Both stone gate [posts with the mis matched walls on either side. A blue wheelie bin is behind the wall on the left.
Gotta put the bins somewhere!
I bought those wheelie bins as used. They are Bruder Toys, 1:16 scale but works well for smaller UK bins. Only thing is Bruder Toys make wheelie bins that don’t have any wheels!

A view of the left side wall, gate post and bins from further down the pavement.
That’s a familiar contemporary view.

Anyway, with the railings gone, someone saw fit to grow a hedge. Sadly it hasn’t been well looked after and needs a good cut.
It was made with coconut fibre mat, as used for hanging baskets, teased apart and covered in model railway flock.

The front garden walls and gate posts with a very over grown and untidy hedge spilling over the low wall on the right.
Flock that!

Daisy has her work cut out with that hedge!

Daisy standing just inside the gate posts to give scale to the posts and the hedge.
“I shall need to get a hedge trimmer.”

That’s it for now. I shall look at the rest of the front garden set up another time. But for the next instalment I will be developing the back of the house and finding a Building Regulations issue.

2 thoughts on “Building ‘The End Terrace’ Dolls House (part 5 the front garden)”

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