Earlier this summer I went to a sale at Peg’s Dollhouse in Santa Rosa and bought what might be the coolest dollhouse I’ll ever own. Peg buys and resells old stock and estates, so she’s guaranteed to have stuff you can’t find anywhere else. When I visited her shop once before I got a bunch […]
Category: Dollhouses (Page 16 of 27)
With the book roombox’s wainscot finished, I moved to the upstairs. I didn’t like the clunkiness of the piece of wood anchoring the top of the staircase, so I used fan pieces to make a decorative cover for it. Sprayed this with semi-gloss black to match the stairs. Geoff wasn’t around so I did it […]
I’ve been working on a half scale roombox made from an embossed book box I got at Pier 1. I’ve seen boxes like this at Michaels before but they always seemed kind of chintsy. These are really nice, though, with heavy leather covers and leather-lined insides. I got both colors — the black one is […]
I recently bought two embossed box boxes from Pier 1 with the plan to make them into half scale roomboxes. The black one has about 9 1/4″ of vertical space inside — big enough to break into two stories in half scale. I had been wanting to try making a spiral staircase out of a […]
(Not that kind of stoned. If a Google search brought you here, my apologies.) When I made the front steps for the Gull Bay, I impulsively made the stairs brick and painted the treads the color of the house, thinking “there must be stairs like this in real life, right?” I should have done some […]
I’m outfitting my Queen Anne Rowhouse with a lot of formal / traditional furniture, but the kitchen is decidedly modern. I bought a set of 3D printed Dog Bone Chairs from Pretty Small Things and wanted a glass-topped table to go with them. Unable to find anything like what I was picturing, I made my […]
For a house whose inside you can barely see through the windows, I spent an awful lot of time on interior trim… When the pieces slide together, there’s enough “slop” on the sides to allow for baseboards on the side walls. At the bottom, I used a piece of strip wood the same width as […]
Interior trim: booooring to work on, but exciting to apply since the rooms look so complete once it’s in. It’s also the last task I have to do to finish up the Gull Bay. I already posted pictures of the downstairs crown molding and baseboards in my last blog. For the upstairs rooms, I pulled […]
With the Gull Bay’s exterior finished, all that remains is interior trim. Since this house will be displayed fully closed up, the only view in is through the windows, so you really only get a glimpse. Because of this I considered not bothering with molding and baseboards but the house felt unfinished to me without […]
I have this tendency, as I get close to finishing part of a dollhouse, to start messing with the thing that’s finished and totally fine the way it is. Usually I’m glad I messed with it. Occasionally I curse myself for getting ambitious and screwing it up when it was perfectly fine already. I’m not […]
With the Gull Bay’s chimneys in, I was able to finish shingling the front of the house. The seam where the shingles meet is, well, not perfect. Also the rows get kind of crookedy near the top. Eh, I did my best. (Or maybe not my best, but the best I felt like doing. Shingling […]
While waiting for a replacement trim piece to come in the mail, I took a break from the Gull Bay porch to do the chimneys. The chimneys are made from blocks of wood, and get covered with the same vinyl brick sheet as the foundation. Skinny trim pieces go over the corners to cover the […]
This past week I made good progress on the Gull Bay, and the exterior’s almost done. I have a ton of pictures so I’ll break them up into two posts. The house came with “lattice” that appears to be made from stiff plastic needlepoint canvas cut on a diagonal. The photo of the completed house […]
Painting windows: not my favorite thing to do. The Gull Bay has nine of them, plus the door frame, plus the three dormer windows I added to the back. I actually skipped the dormers with this batch for reasons I’ll explain below, but over Memorial Day weekend I forced myself to do the rest of […]
The Gull Bay has been sitting for a while, and before that I made some progress that I never blogged about. I pulled the house out again last weekend so now need to play catch-up on the blog. For starters, the wallpaper is now finished. I’m papering this house with white scrapbook paper, since the […]
The Rosedale’s landscaping is more or less complete, so here are pictures of the finished product! But first, a list of handy links to the earlier landscaping entries, that show how we got here: Making the Base | Laying the Patio | Adding Greenery | Finishing the Patio
The final stage of landscaping the Rosedale involved finishing the patio and adding a fence. The patio is made from “slate” (actually, plaster) flagstones. They’re textured with very slight color variation that seemed too dull to me, so I decided to spruce them up using the same technique I’ve used in the past with egg […]
With the patio glued down, it’s time to get some greenery into the Rosedale’s yard. The other two dollhouses I’ve landscaped, the Fairfield and the puzzle house, had very colorful gardens with lots of different kinds of plants. For the Rosedale, my mom and I decided on a more subtle look, mostly green with only […]
With the base finished, the next step in Rosedale landscaping was gluing down the patio. I don’t attach my houses to the base permanently, but I do glue down the landscaping elements, so I had to measure carefully and make sure the patio was properly centered. When I first pulled out these flagstones, I intended […]
This past weekend, my parents visited and I pulled out the Rosedale so we could landscape it together. (My mom is a gardener with a good sense of how to lay out a garden, and my dad’s a woodworker who’s good at things like building swiveling dollhouse bases. They helped me landscape the Fairfield a […]
Emily is a freelance writer, miniaturist, and adventure game enthusiast.
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