I don’t usually put dolls in my dollhouses, but I made an exception when I bought a little resin baby for the nursery.

Since then I’ve been keeping an eye out for dolls to put in the other kids’ rooms — I need a little girl (age 4-ish) and an older girl (age 12-ish). An eBay seller named karens-mini-bears makes adorable baby and kid dolls, sometimes in half scale, but they’re usually 24-hour auctions with a lot of people bidding, and I haven’t waded in.

Recently I saw this little girl on eBay, offered by seller by_lana, and I loved her on sight. The short, messy hair, the little smile, the dress — she just looked like the right doll for the little girl’s room. I hit Buy It Now and paid… and then I looked more carefully at the description. She was only 1″ tall, which would be 24 inches in half scale. I Googled “How tall is a four year old” and Google informed me that the average four year old is 40 inches tall.

I emailed the seller but she’d already sent the package. She told me not to worry, if the doll was too small she accepted returns.

The doll arrived (very quickly from the UK!) while I was working on the Robin Betterley kits. She’s small next to the dollhouse, but maybe not *too* small?

Unfortunately, yes, she’s too small. Especially when the room is strewn with toys, she looks like, well, a doll. Not like a child.

I sadly emailed the seller to tell her the doll would be too small. She refunded my money and graciously told me to keep the doll — excellent customer service, but I felt bad that I hadn’t looked at the measurements more closely before I purchased.

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Last week I set out to finish the Victorianna’s master bedroom but only managed to finish the closet. This week I tackled the other side of the room, which has the tower room and two spaces under the sloped ceiling that needed to be filled up.

I started by wallpapering the outside of the tower room. I didn’t try too hard to get the paper up under the angled roof because I knew I would be redoing the ceiling, like I did in the nursery.

When I first started working on this room last year, I built a shelf to go on the left of the tower room. I took pictures at the time but now I can’t find them. It’s just made from scraps of strip wood, with a piece of luan plywood for the back.

I couldn’t decide what to put on the shelves. I didn’t want to fill them up with books, because that requires making a bunch of books — not hard, but not my favorite thing to do. It was also bothering me that in spite of this being a large room, there’s barely any wall space, so no good place to put a dresser. To solve both problems I decided to turn the built-in shelf into a built-in dresser.

I started by dividing the two shelves into four cubbies.

The top of the unit, where the luan plywood met the basswood, had a visible seam. Rather than spend a lot of time trying to make it look good with wood filler, I cut a piece of thin basswood to go on top.

I made four “drawers” that won’t open. The bottom two are made out of 1:12 channel molding, since it happened to be the right size (1/2″ tall). The top two are a piece of 3/8″ square strip wood, which was the right depth but slightly too short, with a correctly sized drawer front glued on.

The pulls are made from a cut jump ring with the ends inserted into 2mm x 1mm crimp tubes. These are similar to the pulls I made for the Rowhouse kitchen except those didn’t have the crimp tubes, and as a result are very wiggly. I’m hoping the tubes on each end will make them more stable.

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