Starting the flooring – January to May 2009

As is often the case, there are numerous decisions to be made when decorating your own house and the same is true of a dolls house. Choosing the time period was easy, I always knew, once I saw the house that I wanted to keep it Georgian, but doing all the research takes time and making decisions isn't always my strong point.
There are so many options. You start with choosing between paint and wallpaper, but then you have to decide on your colour scheme and think about how furniture will look. All of us become miniature interior designers and I'm sure some are better at it than others.
For me, it's not one of my natural gifts so I have to work at it a little more, hence the extra time taken to decide what materials to use.
One of my first 'finds' was a shop on ebay (though he also has a website: http://www.dollshouse-tiles.co.uk) that did all kinds of veneer flooring tiles. Graham was very helpful later on when I designed my own flooring for my dining room using his shape packs and iron on floorboards. More of that later….
I did the floors for the ground floor early on – the kitchen, hallway / entrance lobby and the library / study.
From dollshouse-tiles / toolshed22 on ebay I purchased some of their 'Marlike' tile packs so I had ½" square black and white marble effect tiles for the hallway / entrance and I chose the black and white tiles for the kitchen but in octagonal tiles.
They were easy to lay – spreading some PVA glue and then sticking the tiles down, a few rows at a time, but it was fiddly with the small pieces in the octagonal floor pack.

In progress:

Here are the results:

 I realised later that my kitchen floor is a bit grand…. Kitchens would have just had stone slabs, not shiny marble, but the tiles are well stuck now and there's room for the odd discrepancy J
I also wasn't happy with the wood flooring in the library / study as I tried to cut the iron on floorboards (from Bromley Craft Products: http://www.craft-products.com/dolls-house-floorboards.asp) to emulate real floorboards but I've made it far too regular so I think I will have to redo that room.
For other rooms more recently completed I have laid the strips whole and will add joints / nail marks later. Info on those will come in a future update J