There are so many details to consider!
I wanted to use a mix of new and reclaimed wood (as Thoreau did: he used a mix of trees he cut himself and boards/nails from a railroad worker's shanty that he bought and tore down). I also, however, wanted it to be very specific: to scale, and ideally authentic down to the type of wood (Thoreau used a mix of white pine and possibly cedar). Reclaimed wood is hard to find in exact sizes, it turns out, and I lack both tools and skills to turn a pile of randomly-sized bits and boards into exact components of a very specific little house. Reclaimed wood also has a tendency to be warped and such, which makes it that much harder to fit all the pieces together and have it not leak. Plywood, on the other hand, is nice and flat and consistently thick, and comes from Home Depot where there are many helpful gentlemen who are happy to cut it up into very specific bits for you. This is handy when all you have to work with is a hand saw, a ruler, and a [very professional] pencil.
Speaking of leaking... I wanted it to be as authentic as possible, but I also wanted it to be watertight and weatherproof. I doubted my ability to make a tiny [dollhouse] window that was watertight and weatherproof, so the window (and the door, and the fireplace...) would have to be decorative. Also, speaking of the fireplace... real bricks were out of the question, so how to make a brick fireplace and chimney? So many questions...
On the other hand, this is when it started to get really fun. I began sourcing various decorative materials online. I found miniature dollhouse shingles made from white pine for the walls, and cedar for the roof! Perfect! My dad came down for the day and we did a lot of sketching and math to figure out exactly what we needed. How would we make the side of the house that would open to provide access to the books? What would we use for tar paper on the roof? Actual tar paper? Something else? How would we affix the shingles to the house and to the roof (it's pretty impossible to nail down a 1"x1"x1/16" shingle)? What would the house rest on? Would we also build the woodshed, which was essential for Thoreau, even though it was detached from the cabin? Etc.
I collected quotes from Thoreau on the subject of his house-building (he was a great writer, but Walden is hardly a builder's guide -- he can be excruciatingly specific about one thing, like the cost of bricks, and then maddeningly general about something else, like where exactly the trap door into the root cellar was located or how he shingled the roof). We decided to look at Thoreau's collected journals, which will hopefully have a lot more detail.
I decided to build the chimney and fireplace out of wood, and paint it to look like brick. Later I found super-awesome 1.5" square by about 3' long cedar stake things, with a 45 degree angle cut at the end, so I bought two and plan to cut down the ends with the angle cuts for the fireplace and affix them to a longer piece from the square end in the middle as the chimney. I'll screw/glue them together, then I'll use my dremel tool to etch the bricks into the wood, then I'll use brick-colored paint mixed with a fine pumice gel medium for texture and paint the whole thing, then I'll use my woodburning tool to burn out the top center of the chimney for effect, then I'll use a pick to scrape the paint out of the etched brick spaces (re-dremeling if needed), then I'll seal the whole thing with a waterproofing sealant and screw it down to the base platform behind the house. Things like this get me super excited these days. This chimney is going to be AMAZING!
And just wait until you see what I have in store for the window...
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