Dollhouse renovation part II: Painting and floors

I am nothing if not tenacious when I get my hands on a new and exciting craft project. And there's little to be done but just run with it until it's done or my creative energy runs out! Plus it's a good distraction from the possibility I will be going on strike next week.

Dollhouse has been cleaned, primed white, and the first coat put on the interior. I bought three bottles of acrylic paint from the dollar store to do the inside ($3). I'm hoping not to need more, but I'm not happy with the green colour (which is some leftover paint from our bedroom), so I may need to pick up another bottle. Plus the red is probably going to need another bottle to get full coverage.

I also spent $4 on a variety of paintbrushes to use in this project. Dollar store paintbrushes aren't going to win any quality awards, but they get the job done.

In addition to the painting, I starting working on the floors. The first step was to make a template of the floor in each room - fortunately this is a very well built dollhouse, and not only is each room actually truly square, they are all the exact same size. So I made one template by taping together some plain paper. Then I traced that template onto some poster board I had lying around and created four floor templates.



I got these jumbo popsicle sticks from the dollar store ($1 each bag, for a total of $2). I'm going to use them for a variety of things within the house, like trimming around the windows, doors, and so forth. I started, however, by creating a floor for one room.


Step one, cut off the rounded edges. This was easier than I thought, although it turns out after doing it 90 times you will get blisters. Which are less than fun.


Big pile of 'floorboards'.


Next up, glue the sticks onto the floor template. Why not glue them directly into the house? Because this way if the floor every needs to be changed for any reason it'll be easy to pull the whole thing out at once. Plus this way I can work on the floors while sitting on the couch in front of the TV, rather than stuck in the basement hunched over.


Floor. Uneven. I put some heavy books on it while the glue was still tacky which smoothed it out nicely. I also applied a coat of clear varnish (had the varnish in the paint closet), which smelled up the house pretty good, so note to self, do that in the garage from now on. The floor is ready to go into the designated room! In this case, the blue room, once it's painted.
.

I also did the kitchen floor by cutting up some peel and stick tiles I had stashed away - I used them in our basement a while ago and had about a half a box left, so I cut a couple of them into 3 by 3 square and stuck them to a floor template. Need to replace the one up there that isn't quite big enough for the space, but overall it looks pretty good. Very kitchen-y. The kitchen will be the yellow room.

I've started working on the other two floors, but neither is done. They are both different and will get their own post once they are done.

Total costs: $9 (paint, paintbrushes, popsicle sticks)