Welcome to the Garfield Mansion Construction Day 1!!  It's been quite a day and hopefully we'll still be adding more tonight.  Today was the first day we finally started the Garfield House my mom got for her birthday at the end of April (we needed about a month to prepare ourselves for what we were about to start.)

Now I'm not going to go into extent detail about each of the directions, but today we got the solid foundation started which, as you can guess, is the most important part of the house.  Before we could lay any of the pieces down and glue them we had to sand the sides of all the pieces to ensure they are smooth and would fit together.  Our method of sanding?  Nail files of course!  I also opted for gloves to avoid some of the pesky splinters that are tiny and difficult to get out.  These are the bigger pieces we had to sand, but trust me, there have already been some pretty small pieces that even nail files are going to be difficult to sand with so stay tuned!

After sanding, all the pieces were laid out so we could make sure we were putting them in the right place before actually gluing them down (don't want to make that mistake even once!)  Now the side pieces needed to stand up so we therefore approached with a couple of methods my mom read on other blogs during her own research.  This involves masking tape (which is cheap by the way) and canned foods sitting in our pantry.  Surprisingly, these worked very well!  The base is sitting on a large piece of wood my dad sanded and made nice for the house to permanently sit on but since we're still moving things around, the wax paper is protecting it from being permanently glued to that base just yet.  

Now this took a couple hours to completely dry.  In that time I managed to be threatened not to mess with it a number of times (but don't worry, I messed with it while no one was watching (:  I haven't messed anything up yet though!)  After it dried we took all the tape off and moved the canned foods, but if you're following along with us and plan on doing what we do, keep the canned foods out!  You are about to need them and a lot more so take a break and go dig in the pantry for anymore that you have and possibly go steal from your neighbor too!  Pumpkin pie mixes are good because Thanksgiving is still a few months away so you can return them later (:  The next part was tricky and we decided to take a break from the directions and do it our own way.  We had to glue the first floor wooden floor onto the outlined base.  To do this we had to outline the top of the base we had already built with glue along the top of all the wood, then we laid the flat wood on top on the base and clicked all the slits in together.  Does that make sense? The pictures explain better from the side views.  We did run into one problem in a corner where it didn't fit, but luckily dad has a plethora of tools in the garage and a strong file fixed that problem in a matter of seconds.  Then came putting nearly every can we have on top to hold it all in place.  Who knew we had so many cans of refried beans!   

Now, while that is drying, which I'm sure will take a couple of hours, we are about to start working on the stair cases which involves a lot of little pieces.  So now we're off to punch out each piece, file them, and then commence to gluing together tiny suitcases for tiny people.  

Stay tuned for more from Tiny Tools Construction (yes I do think that's a clever name!)  Wish us luck!