A while back, I told you about the Rolife miniature room kits I’d ordered. I’ve made good progress on one of them, along with a bunch of changes, and thought I’d share an update with you today.

Here’s the manufacturer’s picture of Sam’s Study. (That link will take you to the Rolife website, but you can buy these kits at many places, including Amazon and Walmart.)

This is one jam-packed little room! It also has a lot of orange, which didn’t thrill me.

Here’s my study, which is still in progress. You can already see that I’ve made changes.

The printed floor included in my kit has dark green squares instead of turquoise ones. Either way, it had to go. I bought a downloadable printable PDF on Etsy for hardwood floors, printed out the one I liked and laminated it with matte transparent contact paper. I then cut it to fit the raised floor and the surround, and glued it in place. It’s much darker than the brown stain on the included wood pieces, so I painted the two that edge the floor black. (In this picture, they need a second coat.) I also painted the ceiling lattice pieces black.

I “papered” the walls of my study with a William Morris wallpaper design, also a downloadable and printable PDF from Etsy. I changed the size of it to make it look right, printing it at 25%, then matched the pattern on the walls. I also papered around the outside of the box, as if there’s a hall and foyer beyond it. I’m moving some of the pictures out there.

I tried a few kinds of glue and had the best success with Aleene’s Original Tacky Glue. It’s a white glue that dries clear. It’s great for the paper and the wood pieces. For metal and beads, I used E-6000 which also dries clear (but smells a lot worse).

There are a couple of frustrating things about these kits, although overall I’m enjoying them. The scale is a little bit arbitrary (I talked about that last time) and seems to fluctuate between 1:12 and 1:24 scale, depending on the item in question. That’s probably part of what makes the room look so crowded. Also, the included materials tend to warp so it’s hard to get crisp square corners. Everything is a bit tippity, but maybe that’s part of the charm.

All of the book and picture elements are pre-printed on a very thin paper. This works really well for folding pages of a book interior, but is a lot less effective for a suitcase or a book box. (Many of the volumes on the shelves aren’t individual books – they’re five-sided boxes, printed with spines and pages, that you assemble and fit into the shelf in a block.) After I mucked up the suitcase (mine has been around the world a few times and is a bit battered as a result) I made a change to the book boxes: I glued them to a sheet of bristol board to give them more structural integrity then cut them out and built them. This worked really well.

That’s a book box at the front left, and my study with the chandelier installed. It looks really cool when it’s turned on, but the LED lights are really bright – they fake out the camera. I”ll have to get around that to show you the finished room. I hung the map so it’ll be centered over that left bookcase, which will be centered between the other bookcase end and the corner. The little red bookcase is going in the hall.

The chandelier was the toughest part IMO. I was a bit concerned the electrical work, but it was just holding all those pieces together that was complicated. I checked the lights constantly and they worked until the chandelier was installed. Now the one on the bottom doesn’t light up, but I’m not taking it apart. My chandelier also hangs a bit low, but that’s where it’s staying. 🙂 You can see that I need to use a marker on the floor line, too, something that isn’t evident IRL but the camera picks up.

Here’s what it looks like around the back:

This is my foyer and hall “wallpaper”. It’s an Italian paper that I bought when I took a bookmaking class. It came from 32 Degrees North, but they no longer have this one in stock. (They have a lot of other beauties – that link will take you to their Italian Papers page.)

Now I have bookcases to finish painting and book boxes to build. I’ll show you the miniature again when the room is done.