La Mignonette Makeover.... Part 1

I'm taking a few days off from ALL the other makeover projects to concentrate on taking a run at my La Mignonette building works.  I'm quite literally 'raising the roof' to add another storey on top of the existing shop and workshop/doll's hospital, in order to accommodate all the lovely dolls, toys and games from my erstwhile day nursery roombox.

Fortunately I never glued the mansard roof onto the top, otherwise this damn fine plan would have fallen at the first hurdle.  So far I've painted the exterior walls and wallpapered the interior walls prior to the actual build.  One of the bugbears of the upper storey kit is the slablike front wall so I just had to put a window in.  On the first floor of La Mignonette, Mlle Emilie's workroom, I installed French doors leading out onto a little balcony.  On the second floor I've opted for quite a large window, which will have railings along the front, mirroring the balcony and windows on the first floor, hopefully tying the overall Frenchified design together.   

I don't have curtains on any of the other windows so I'm going to go to town on the new top floor and will make some opulent silk curtains, with swags and drapes, and tasselled tie-backs. 

As this room is going to showcase my large collection of tiny toys and games, I decided to put shelved units all along two walls, and as I want to colour coordinate them to the decor, I opted for bare wood shelving units with removeable/adjustable shelving.   I've used this type of shelving in many different projects and never had any issues before, but not this time.

You would think, wouldn't you, that the whole point of having removeable shelving is that you can actually remove the shelving so you can adjust them?  Every other display shelf like this I've bought before had little wooden strips between each section of shelving, which were attached with double sided sticky tape, so that they could easily pop off, so that the shelves could be slid out.

For some reason now though, some bright spark in the design team has decided that those wooden strips should be GLUED down.

With HEAVY DUTY INDUSTRIAL GLUE!

Which meant that prising them off took big chunks out of the shelves AND the strips.   I am beyond incensed.   What should have been a 5 minute job, taking out the shelves, turned into a marathon session requiring a screwdriver, craft knife and small hammer.

And swearing.

LOTS of swearing.

I came close, several times, to throwing the whole bally lot out the window.

When I'd finally prised off the wooden strips, I then had to make good the damage.  Shaving off chunks of glued, splintered wood, from both the display units and the strips.  Which, obviously, didn't improve my mood any.

So I have four of these.  The one on the left shows the original unit, with the three wooden strips in situ.  On the right, after about an hour of cursing, is a unit with the sodding strips ripped off, followed by meticulous shaving and sanding to remove all the glued/splintered chunks of wood. 

In the past I've replaced the acrylic shelves with wooden ones, but I might just paint the acrylic ones as I'm losing the will to live with the whole thing.

To be continued.....