True to the real-life Osteria Al Vecchio Stallo (above), I wanted a dark hardwood floor in my dollhouse. I started by staining ten 3-foot-long strips of 1/16-inch balsa wood with a dark walnut stain. Next, I cut them into lengths of 2.5, 3, and 3.5 inches. After sanding the ends, I touched up the stain with a Minwax stain marker (a really awesome product that made the job so much easier and faster).
After gluing all the planks down, I varnished the floor with semi-gloss varnish. One thing about these Street of Shops kits that has been rather frustrating is that the walls weren’t cut precisely to size, which leaves some corners not at right angles. That posed a little problem along the right wall here, where I needed to cut a thin triangular wedge to fill the gap. Fortunately, all the uneven edges will be hidden by the baseboard.
Balsa really soaks up the stain, so the color came out a little darker than I expected, but I still love the rustic look. (The light areas in the photo below really stood out in the glare of the sun. They don’t actually appear this light to the naked eye.)
The facades of these shops come preassembled, and you can see in the next photo how this one was not glued together straight. The window section and the door meet at a slight angle. This made cutting the sidewalk fairly tricky, but since the baseboard will cover the uneven cuts of the floor boards, it wasn’t as much of a problem here. However, the baseboard won’t extend across the door threshold, so I needed to sand those planks to match the angle.
