Let the Rennovations Begin...

It's been a very busy few months with the holidays and family visiting. Things have calmed down and now I can begin to working on rennovating my dollhouse.

It's a good thing too, because I was getting really tired and annoyed looking at the poor thing with it's yellow windows and peeling wallpaper. Even more so since the dollhouse is in a prominent place in our living room and actually, one of the first things you see as you enter the room.

I took some pictures of the dollhouse in it's present state. If you click the pictures to enlarge them, you can see the details. I figure these pictures will be great "before" and "after" pics.

As you see in the pictures, I really have my work cut out for me, but it's a challenge I'm looking forward to! My dollhouse has a front removable panel for access to the front rooms that don't go all the way through. In the second picture above, you see the back of the front removable panel.

One of the shutters fell off during the move. I have the shutter and could glue it on, but I don't like the shutters so I'm going to replace them. The old shutters are too plain, and I'd have to scrape off the butterfly decals and repaint them. Instead, I bought new shutters - half of which arrived, half of which were on backorder and should come in a week or so. What a job I had finding new shutters! As you can see from some of the other pictures, the front windows are very close together which meant that I couldn't get standard size shutters. I had to find ones that were less then 1 1/4" or go with two different types/sizes of shutters. Fortunately, I found some from Timberbrook which I ordered through one of their dealers. They are the right size and should work perfectly!

This is a close up of the front of the house. You can see the tabs that hold the front panel on. One of the windows also fell out during the move since they were stapled in on the inside. I have the window, but, like with the shutters, I'm going to replace all the windows. I'm going to make mullions out of balsa wood and attach them to the plastic panes. This picture shows what I mean about the shutters being so close together. The new shutters I got are narrower then the ones up there so when I install them, I'll actually have a bit more room between shutters which will look much nicer!

This is the former dining room. It's the worst room in the house. I installed a Houseworks Brand hardwood floor but must have used rubber cement or put the glue on in splotches because the floor did not come up nicely (as you can see). As a result, I'm going to have to keep scraping away at the glue/paper residue and probably end up sanding the floor and applying a new coat of polyurethane.

The blue dots are left over blue-tack sticky stuff that I used to attach pictures, curtains, etc. That came right off but left some stains on the door frame. It doesn't matter though, the door frame is getting repainted.

There are many more pictures in my gallery. If you click the link on the left that says "First Dollhouse - Before" you can see closeups of the other rooms.

In my next post, I'll talk about the ideas I have for rennovations and post some pictures of my progress.

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.