How to Paint a Beacon Hill Dollhouse so it looks Abandoned or Haunted

So, during lockdown in 2020, I was lucky enough to find a reasonably priced Beacon Hill Victorian mansion for sale on marketplace. I purchased it, made some repairs, and decided to redecorate it as an aged house, fallen into disrepair.

This is my Beacon Hill on the day I purchased it. The porch had become detached and it really needed new paint on the exterior. A few minor pieces were missing but nothing I was concerned about, as I planned to make it a neglected house.

First things first, I needed to reattach the porch, which, luckily, was included with the house. I used wood glue and painstakingly pieced it all back together.

This photo shows the reattached porch, plus the beginning of the first layer of new paint.

Next step was a layer of light gray paint. I used some leftover house paint that I had laying around.

For the next step, I found some dark gray paint, and, using a stiff-bristled brush, I scrubbed this paint into the cracks and crevices to look like weathering and dirt. I scrubbed the brush up and down and side to side, wiping away excess paint, until i had achieved the look I wanted. I continued to do this over the whole exterior of the house.

Adding some green.

After the dark gray was looking the way I wanted, the next step was to add a bit of dark green. I wanted it to be very faint, so i brushed it on with my stiff brush and then wiped it off. The trick to this was to make it not uniform. I tried to make it more pronounced in areas that I felt might have more water runoff, for instance, and on areas of the boards that might be more exposed to the sun. In real life I have a white house, and have had to clean my own siding, so I have observed this to an extent.

I still need to paint the base, but I haven’t decided how I want to make the base look, yet. I may go with a cinder block foundation, which would require a different look, so, for now, I chose to leave it.

I plan on changing the shingles to a fishscale look, so I didn’t touch them at this time. It does look fine with the shingles that are on it, but I really wanted the fishscales, and will add them at a later time.