Tiling for the floor in the kitchen and scullery was going to be mightily expensive. I first decided on using popsicle sticks to make a wood floor - but had to change my mind when our local shops all seemed to have a distinct lack of wooden lolly sticks for sale. As I scrolled through pages and pages of early Victorian kitchen pictures, I noticed that a lot of them did have stone flooring - huge tiles laid quite roughly. I thought about what I had to hand... and turned once again to my trusty grey-board :)
I had some acrylic paints - and so watered them down and gave a grey wash to my grey-board ... but unfortunately used up all my white acrylic paint. Still, I persevered using black, dark blue and a little brown paint colours to mottle the A4 grey-board. After it had dried, I cut the board (it's like thick cardboard - about the same as two layers of cereal packet card) into 1" strips. These strips I Then cut further to make rectangles 1" by 2" - saving the leftover bits and throwing nothing away.
I bound up 20 or so 'tiles' at a time with elastic bands, and then sanded the edges so that they were about the same size - I didn't want to be too precise about it.
I stacked up the tiles all ready to use...
I made a paper template of the rooms I wanted to lay the floor tiles into - just using cheap printer paper. I then had to decide how I wanted to lay out the tiles. At first, it was going to be staggered in straight lines... but that was just too easy - and a little boring too.
The tiling was lapped over the edges of the paper - mainly using the off-cuts from when I made the strips of cardboard tiles. I glued the tiling to the paper using a good strong wood glue. When everything was in place, I piled a couple of books on top - followed by anything heavy I had to hand... left over Christmas booze bottles, laptop, spray cans of paint, etc...lol
After a few hours, I uncovered the flooring sheet, turned it over, and cut away anything that was overlapping the edges of the template paper.
I then dry-fitted the flooring into the dolls house - making sure it was the right size, and that I had no significant gaps.
All okay - so I then used my favourite product of all time... MODPODGE!
I brushed it on, then stippled over with a cheap brush - keeping tweezers handy to pick off the stray brush hairs that fell off.
And there we have it! Kitchen and scullery floors all done - now onto the popsicle walls :)
