My First Dollhouse

For my first blog post, I felt it would only be appropriate to blog about my first dollhouse.

My first dollhouse is a very old dollhouse that was once owned by a woman on my father's mail route. The woman bought the dollhouse for her daughter from FAO Schwartz in New York City. When the woman's daughter got too old she gave the dollhouse to my father to give to me. That was about 30 years ago. I estimate that the dollhouse is about 50 years old based on the age of the woman's daughter when I got the dollhouse. The house looks to be assembled from a kit, and I think it was pre-assembled at the store and purchased after it was assembled.

I played with the dollhouse when I was young, then it eventually went into the basement after I grew up and my interests changed. When I got older I was cleaningthe basement of my parents house, saw the dollhouse and decided to move it into my parents apartment. My mother let me "borrow" her cedar chest to put the dollhouse on it. I customized the dollhouse since I didn't like the original colors. Before I knew it, that became my hobby - scouring doll house stores, catalogs, etc., and furnishing and painting my dollhouse.

When I moved into my own place, the dollhouse came with me. I got a small table from the preschool where my mother worked that fit the dollhouse perfectly. I decorated the dollhouse for Christmas and continued to work on it. After I met my husband, we moved to Florida and the dollhouse came with me. It survived a move intact on the table in the moving truck, and was promptly put into storage due to lack of space in our house. My dollhouse was out of sight, but never out of mind. Whenever I went to storage to put something in there, I always looked at my dollhouse yearning for the day I would have it back in my house and work on it again.

We moved into a larger house and now I have space to display my dollhouse. My dollhouse has taken a bit of a beating in storage. There are some chips and nicks in the wood. The old wallpaper is peeling, the paint has yellowed with dirt and age, and the original staples holding the acetate windows are coming out. It didn't take me long to decide that this house needs a major rennovation.

During the move, I have been fantasizing about not only displaying my dollhouse again, but rennovating it from top to bottom, including refurnishing it.

The pictures in my gallery were taken in 1991 when I was working on the dollhouse. You can see pictures by clicking on the link for My First Dollhouse Pictures. The pictures were taken with a cheap, traditional camera (before the time of digital cameras). In another post, I'll include details about the dollhouse itself and some of my many plans for updating the house.