Sunshine Town
April 21, 2023
What the hell happened to March?? Geez Louise!
Anyway, I seem to have acquired yet another new hobby - building book nooks.
A book nook, in case you don't know, is a bookend, but not just any bookend. It's a bookend with a scene built right in, and you do the building from a kit. SonnyeBoy gave me one for Christmas, called Sunshine Town. Since he and his sweety were coming to visit for Easter, I knew I wanted to finish it by then.
Plus, it looked so cute!
I waded into the kit in early March and promptly got confused and tired. There was supposed to be a paintbrush for painting the edges of the pieces, but I couldn't find it. So I put the kit away for a couple more weeks. Then I looked again, and I realized that it was there; it was just little and had a tiny, stiff brush head.
Well, the whole painting the edges of the pieces got old fast and I decided that leaving the edges unpainted gave the piece a nice, rustic look. I continued on.
The actual pieces come in flat pieces of thin boards and such. You snap each piece out of the board as you build. They're identified by a letter (the board) and a number (the individual piece). The numbering is not always legible, but my trusty magnifying glass solved that problem. The instructions are an arcane code that require several readings to decipher. Think Ikea but denser and with bad translations from Chinese. Once you crack the code it gets immensely easier.
Most of the pieces fit together; other parts must be glued. The fitty parts are usually pretty snug, but some are looser than others. At one point the whole wee staircase and porch fell apart because the fit wasn't tight enough. I growled and decided to glue every damn thing. That helped a lot, as did keeping the sheets of pieces in alphabetical order.
The part that nearly broke me was the installation of the lights. These lights actually light up by way of two AA batteries in a hidden battery box. So you have do some tricky wire wrangling and battery box building and touch pad switch installing and I screwed it up several times and then decided the hell with the lights. The roof is translucent, so any overhead light does a decent job of illuminating the street.
After I was done, I touched up the top of the roof with the paint to give it a less rustic look. I also got a Sharpie and touched up the wee sign right in the front.
Anyway, here's how it turned out! I like it a lot, even without the lights. I do want to pry up the white kitty and turn it so it faces out. At least I got the yellow kitty facing forward.
(By the way, that amazing piece of art in the background is by the lovely and immensely talented Wendy Weetabix. You should buy her book of great short stories, Entry Level as soon as you finish reading this.)
Here's a closer look at the inside.
Of course, I happened on a series of YouTube videos that show how to assemble these things after I was done, including one that goes into detail on how to do the damn wiring. Hmmph. Will I try to do some urban renewal on dear wee Sunshine Town? Maybe if I hadn't glued it to a fare-thee-well. Or, I could buy another one and build it again!
I'll have to think about that, because I'm currently working on a different book nook called Magic House, and there are three other kits waiting in the hobby store for me.