The Dollhouse Project

When I was a little girl, I got a dollhouse for Christmas when I was 7 years old. I adored that dollhouse. I played with it for years and could spend hours rearranging the furniture, redecorating, and playing with the occupants of the house. Over the years, I added furniture, accessories, and even a second house that my dad built based on the first one.

When I was a teen, I finally packed it up before we moved away from Virginia. The house went to Pennsylvania, and then North Carolina, where it spent twelve years waiting for a little girl to be born and to be old enough to play with it.

This is the original house - made from a kit and never painted! The first thing I did to make it special for Gracie was get started with the painting.

Gracie even helped a little too (seen here painting the roof of dollhouse number two - which my dad built based on the original kit house).

We moved around some toys and prepared the area under her bed to become the dollhouse neighborhood. The house on the left is a Calico Critters dollhouse. A lot of the stuff from that mixes well with the things I have saved over the years both in size and style.

We had fun with the exterior colors, making the small house green with black shutters. Inside, it got even more colorful.

I am loving the cream and navy color scheme (with brick red doors picking up the color of the chimney bricks) on this house.

Inside, I had more colorful fun - particularly with the pre-printed plywood floor. I filled in the "tile" pattern downstairs and did a fake brick and stone fire place.

Once these houses were painted, I took them back to my house and helped my daughter furnish them. Then, I began making curtains. I wanted her to be able to switch around the curtains so I used hook and loop tape to mount them on the walls above each window. The windows in my two old houses are standard sizes so they will be interchangeable.

Here are some of the completed rooms:

The "completed" neighborhood...although I am quite certain that there will be more details to add over the years. As of now, every surface on the old houses have been painted. Every window in all 3 (except the curved windows in the CC house) have window treatments of varying styles. Now I remember why I wanted to shrink down and live inside my dollhouses when I was a little girl. It's a pretty cool little world!