Day Twelve -- Shingles and More Painting

Realizing that waiting for Mike to make me a drying screen was getting me nowhere (I *really* have to work on my whining skills), I decided to go ahead and start with the dying process. The instructions say to give them four to five days to dry. Since we will be gone for several days, now seemed like a good time. The little package of dye came with one (yes, *one*) latex glove to use. I've gone through about a dozen so far and will be donning a new pair each time I move them around. The instructions suggested wearing old clothes as this would be a messy process and they weren't kidding. In spite of wearing gloves, I've managed to stain a few fingers and that looks rather disgusting.

The dye is mixed with water (no chlorine, please) and then put into the bottom half of a gallon milk jug. The top half is used to filter the shingles into a bowl to reuse the dye. It was too messy to take pictures before or during. Here's the after:

Leftover dye gets labeled and put into the refrigerator for later use on touch-ups. Eww...

The shingles then "steep in a heap" for an hour. Not having a drying rack, I put parchment paper on a screen:

The dye is reddish brown from the same company that made the dollhouse kit. Hey -- they oughta know:

Then, since there wasn't much else to do, I painted some more. Like the panels on the front door, which turned out rather well, if amateurish, and part of the stringer for the stairs. I only need to paint one side of the stringer, and I'm pretty sure that I chose the correct side, but I will probably paint both sides so that I won't feel stupid later on:

The shingles got mixed around after an hour and every two hours for the rest of today:

Tomorrow they get spread out more for a more complete drying.

To prepare for putting the shingles on, I drew shingle lines on the roof. The instructions say to put the bottom line one shingle length from the edge, and every other line one inch away. I asked Mike to measure the shingle length to save me a trip downstairs. Which he did, but in millimeters, and he pointed out that there was a range in length of 32.1 to 32.3 millimeters. How helpful.

The picture with the instructions show that the first line of shingles reach over the hole for the gable, but that's not what happened when I measured them:

I'm not sure how to deal with that, but will mostly deal with it for a while by putting off worrying about it until next week.