How to tile a dollhouse roof with card tiles

My Sid Cooke dollhouse shop kit was looking good so far – the next stage was that I needed to work out how to tile a dollhouse roof with card tiles! I’d bought the Versi-slate textured card doll’s house roof tiles from Richard Stacey at the same time that I bought the Versi-slips (textured card brick slips) for the body of the doll’s house. The tiles come in smallish packs so you don’t have loads left over, and they are light grey on one side and dark grey on the other, so you can choose to have dark, light, or a mixture of the two – I chose to use all the dark sides. The brickwork had been time-consuming to do, but the finished result was wonderful, so I expected the roof to really look good once it was done.

However….my husband is a perfectionist, so when I said, ‘I’m going to tile my doll’s house roof today!’, he said, ‘What, all of it? In one day? Are you sure?’ Such confidence! I think he thought I’d do it in too much of a rush, or something….Anyway, he decided to help me do it – so we had a great time sticking tiles on all day, and it meant that I could take the photos while he did the fiddly bits!

I had already painted the two sides of the roof with grey undercoat. Chris nailed the roof panels onto the body of the house with panel pins.

I drew guidelines in pencil on the roof before the panels were nailed in place, so that I would then be able to line up all the tiles really straight. The first row up from the bottom is the depth of one whole tile, and the rest are half a tile deep (as the tiles overlap).

This image shows the overhang of the roof panel when the first one had been attached – you can see the groove that the gable end boards will be pushed into later. All my lovely neat brickwork into the triangle of the roof will be covered up then <sniff>.

I stuck a thin strip of dark card along the very bottom edge of the roof, so that the tiles would poke out at a bit of an angle, like real ones do. The instructions said to make this about a millimetre deep. Mine was about 5mm deep. Once the strip was stuck on, we realised that you would be able to see the lighter roof colour a bit in between the tiles – it would have been better to make the strip about an inch deep, to cover up the vertical gaps between tiles on the first row.

So, we ‘coloured in’ the roof with a permanent marker pen for about an inch!

Using PVA glue, we attached the first row of tiles, starting from the outside edges and working in towards the centre. Working fairly quickly, it allowed enough time to adjust the positioning of the tiles before the glue set.

After attaching three rows of tiles on the back roof side, we worked out where the chimney stack was to go, and glued that in place.

This is how we attached each row of tiles – adding a line of PVA, then spreading it out with an old brush (*any* brush is an ‘old brush’ after I’ve been using it, as I never clean them properly!!), putting the glue partly on the previous row of tiles, but being careful not to spread it so low down that it would show when the row of tiles is attached.

Chris did the fiddly bit of cutting the tiles to fit around the chimney stack. The tiles cut very easily with scissors.

You can buy packs of ridge tiles, which are made of the same material as the tiles, but to a different shape, and you just fold them in the middle and glue them over the ridgeline of the roof. In this image you can also see the gable ends stuck in place.

This is the chimney stack, in place on the roof. If I was doing this again, I’d have started bricking the chimney itself from the base up to the top, and not the other way round, as there is a small area that isn’t bricked right at the bottom of the stack, but that’s just me being picky!

So, this is how my Sid Cooke dollhouse shop looks now. I love the way the roof tiles have worked out. It looks so much more ‘solid’ now, and like a real building!

To tile this roof, I used 2 packs of the Richard Stacey Versi-slates (each one covers about 185 square inches) @£12.95 in 2017 , and one pack of 20 Versi-slate ridge tiles @ £2.75, so it was quite a cheap option. The tiles can be bought from the Stacey’s Miniature Masonry website.

And we got it all done in one day!!!  🙂  What do you think of it?

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Are you interested in doll’s houses and stitching? Then why not visit my website, where you can buy doll’s house needlepoint kits to make all kinds of soft furnishings for one-twelfth scale dollhouses. There are over 280 kits to choose from, plus chart packs, fabric project packs, tutorials, and lots of eye candy to inspire you! Kits are available on 18 and 22 count canvas, 28 and 32 count evenweave, and 32 and 40 count silk gauze, so there’s something for everyone – from beginners to experts.

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