Merry Christmas!

It was a very good day!

24 Days of Christmas: Day 16. A long overdue dollhouse update!

I haven't forgotten the dollhouse! After all, this is kiddo #1's big present. Here's the completed exterior - I've been debating some additional decoration, but I think I'll leave it like this. Simple yet pretty!

The interior is starting to come together. I made a couple of little beds for the kid's room, and picked up the box at the dollar store, I guess we can call it a toy box. It'll be useful for storing little bits and pieces. I'm going to keep the furniture relatively minimal, on the theory we can always provide more furniture for birthdays and such later on. So there will be a mix of home made furniture and some store bought Plan Toys and Educo stuff (my parents are providing a kitchen set and a household accessories set; I think I will get a dining room set).

(this blogging every day for 24 days thing is getting tiring! But I think I'm going to make it...)

Dollhouse renovation part VII: Exterior and furniture

Progress on the house exterior! Windows are framed and painted purple, and I've painted some grass along the bottom. I'll be adding in some flowers as well. Also, note the hook and eye set ($1) to keep the doors closed when not in use. Paints are from my craft supplies.

I have to figure out what to do with the roof. It looks kind of wrong to leave it just plain.


I also painted grass along the bottom of this side, and added some vines and flowers. Painting is not where my talents lie, clearly, but I think it's prettier than the plain white, and it was fun to paint!


Close up. This actually looks a lot better in person. Really, I swear.


The interior is fully painted. I'm not happy with the curtains, so I'm going to change those. I'll post more about the curtains when I get them figured out.


I picked up these dolls a couple of weeks ago. My brother and his wife will also be supplying a set of dolls, so the kiddo will have a nice big family to play with and live in the house! It's handy to have these ones here to provide scale as I start building furniture. While I would love to furnish the house completely with Plan toys stuff, it's expensive! So for now most likely just the kitchen will get purchased furniture, and the rest I'll make enough for ongoing play. Further sets can be birthday presents later on.

This is the bed I made for the blue room.


Mattress and pillow were made out of my fabric stash.


The bed is super simple - just popsicle sticks glued together.


On the bottom, I drilled holes into the popsicle sticks for legs made out of some dowel from the dollar store, glued the dowel into the holes, and stuck some tacks in the bottom just for the heck of it. This works surprisingly well! Now I have to make a couple of similar beds for the kid's room.

Total spent this post - $1 for hook and eye.
Total spent to date: $17.

Dollhouse renovation part VI: Interior almost done!

A reminder of what I started with on this rapidly becoming epic project.

How it looks right now! The interior is almost done - the trim in the green room needs one coat of paint, but that's the last thing, other than the curtains, which I'm still figuring out.

Aren't those chairs cute? I got them from an Etsy seller, and very reasonably priced. I'm not including them in the cost, for that I'm just accounting for anything used on the dollhouse itself. The other thing in the blue room is a folding screen I made out of popsicle sticks and some elastic from my sewing stash.



I found this set of wooden painted letters at the dollar store and just couldn't resist using them to decorate the kid's room.


This doesn't look much different in the picture, but in real life you can tell! Two coats of white semi-gloss paint from the paint cupboard. And now that that is done, it's time to figure out decorating the outside! I'm going to trim the windows in popsicle sticks (of course!) painted lavender and see how that looks. Also I have to install a hook and eye to hold the doors closed, as they tend to swing open.

Spent on wooden letters: $1
Total spent to date: $16

Doll house renovation part V: STILL working on the interior

It's coming along! I'm actually surprisingly close to finishing the interior. The floors are all installed, and the windows have all been framed.

The blue room has had two coats of dollar store white acrylic applied to the trim, and I think that's plenty. ($1 spent on paint; the small paintbrushes I'm using for trim work I have a ton of already). Which means there's actually only one more thing to do here - install the 'curtain rod' and make the curtains. I'll cover that in a separate post.


Floor installed in the red room. I like it!

I've started putting in the trim in the yellow room. I'm hoping tonight to get all the remaining trim glued down in all three remaining rooms so that tomorrow I can apply the wood filler to the cracks and then get it painted. The window frames in the yellow and green rooms are both fully painted, so I can get the curtain rods installed there too; the red room window frame needs at least one coat to cover the wood filler. If I can find some craft varnish for a reasonable price I would like to make the trim semi-gloss, just because I think that would look nice, but I may not get to that.

Then it's on to the outside! Right now I am thinking I will paint it white with some semi-gloss pure white paint I have leftover from when we painted our house. Then I'll trim around the windows with the popsicle sticks, probably painted lavender. I'd also like to paint vines and flowers on the outside, but we'll see.

I would like to figure out at least a little bit of furniture (I don't plan to go overboard here, as I figure dollhouse furniture will make good gifts for birthdays and that sort of thing over the next couple of years!). I picked up a few things from the dollar store that will be useful in furniture creation, I'm going to play around with any leftover popsicle sticks, and I'm hoping to maybe get my hands on some Barbie furniture - I have some paints especially for plastic so I could paint the Barbie furniture to be a little less bubblegum. Assuming I can find some, of course!

Spent on paint: $1
Total spent to date: $15

Doll house renovation part IV: More interior progress

Coming along! The swine flu appears to be on its way out, finally, which will hopefully mean more craft time (and a kid who isn't sick, of course).

The green room is painted ($2 spent on craft paint from the dollar store), and the floor laid. The floor in the green room is made of wooden coffee stir sticks ($1 at the dollar store). I'm not 100% thrilled with it, but the important thing is it's DONE.

Shot of the green room, with the window framed.


Blue room with trim added. I'm making 'baseboards' out of the popsicle sticks leftover from making the floor here - it took slightly more than 1 bag to do this floor, so I have a TON left, hopefully enough to do the trim in the whole house.


Framing the door. Here you can kind of see the 'seams' between the popsicle sticks, which I've filled in with some wood filler I had on hand.

Close up.


I have wood filler lying around, so I'm using it to smooth out the seams. I think I'm going to paint the trim in the whole house interior white to kind of give the whole thing a unified look, even though each room has a different colour and a different floor. Pure white trim throughout should sort of pull it all together. In theory. Actually painting it is probably going to be a massive pain in the ass - I think I might paint a whole bunch of the popsicle sticks white tonight. They'll need a final coat put on after being installed, but it'll make the trim painting in the other three rooms significantly easier if most of the sticks are already white! Should have thought about that before I starting gluing trim pieces all over the place.


The red room is the kid's room, so it'll have this crazy multicoloured floor. Dollar store again, these popsicle sticks come prepainted in lots of colours. $2 for two bags, with a ton left over that I can use for other things, like maybe some popsicle stick furniture. I used some clear varnish from the paint closet to finish and seal the popsicle sticks.

Total spent for this post (paint, popsicle sticks): $5

Total to date: $14

Dollhouse renovation part III: interior trim

I was able to sneak down to the basement for a little while yesterday while the sick-but-improving kiddo was sleeping, and did a little work on the dollhouse. The interior is mostly painted (the green and red rooms need another coat, but the blue and yellow are done). And I started mucking around with how to trim the windows - originally I was thinking to just paint, but I played a bit with some popsicle sticks and came up with this:


The popsicle sticks don't fit together perfectly because the kitchen shears I was using to cut them kind of warp the wood during cutting, but it's good enough. I have some wood filler I'm going to use to smooth things out, then I'll paint the trim to coordinate with the room (probably dark blue). I'll also trim around the door.

I found the best way to do this was first make a template of the window, then get everything cut out and fitted before gluing things down.

I also did the window of the yellow room. These don't actually take very long! I'm hoping today I can finish the interior painting and start getting the finished floors installed, since they'll need to be glued down and then weighted for a day or two so they stay down.

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)

Doll house renovation part I: before

This Christmas, for various reasons, we are trying to spend as little as possible. And what we do get for the kids, I want to be high quality stuff that they will actually play with, as opposed to most toys which get played with once or twice and then tossed on the pile. We have, frankly, way too many toys already. I also want to do as much handmade as possible (hence all the trades I've been doing with people on Etsy!).

So when I stumbled on this dollhouse listed for sale on Kijiji, I couldn't snap it up fast enough! Not only does my older daughter LOVE dolls, with two daughters I suspect a doll house will get years of use. And when it's no longer useful as a dollhouse, it can be used as a bookcase. $20 (and a helpful trip from my inlaws with their van) later, and it's now sitting in my basement. Smuggling it in without my older daughter seeing it was a bit of a trick, but we got it done.

It's all wood, very simple design, with the hinged doors on the front that open to reveal the interior:



It's essentially a completely blank canvas, and I cannot wait to get started on 'renovating' it! I've removed the stickers and the wallpaper, and given the whole thing a wash with TSP. I need to hit it with a magic eraser to remove the remaining drawings so that painting over them won't be too difficult. Tonight I'm going to prime it white with some porch and floor white paint I have lying around (apparently I got rid of the bucket of primer that I'm sure I had at one point, dang). I'd like to spend as little as possible on this renovation, so will be trying to use mostly things I already have. After priming, I've got some semi-gloss white trim paint that will be the final white coat.

Then I have all kinds of thoughts on how to finish it off! I'm thinking each room will have a different colour theme, and I'll probably make curtains for the windows and figure out something interesting for flooring (I wonder if popsicle sticks could be hardwood floors?). For the exterior I'll probably paint frames around the windows and maybe shutters and flowers/vines/bushes around the bottom. And I need to get some sort of latch for the front to keep it closed when not it use; maybe just a hook and eye set.

I will post updates as I work on it, and a running tally of costs to help keep me motivated to keep expenses minimal.