With the puzzle houses assembled, it’s time to make them look (sort of) like gingerbread. But first, here are some pictures of my mom’s real gingerbread houses, for context.

The stained glass windows are made from crushed Lifesavers, and the pieces are glued together with melted sugar. Note the open doors. As a wee lass I apparently went down a row of finished houses and closed the doors one by one.

Back to the fakes. I painted a base coat of my Glidden Spiced Gingerbread and then filled in the slots to make them less noticeable. (Yeah, I should have done that *before* painting…)

I wasn’t quite sure what to do with this door. I thought I could glue the door slightly open, like on the real houses, but that leaves some gaps that would be hard to fill in. Just seemed kind of sloppy.

I ended up putting the piece I’d punched out of the doorway back in. I can still glue in a door that’s ajar, but it’ll look neater this way. The windows aren’t punched out so it isn’t weird that the door isn’t punched out either.

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I just moved from a house that had a dedicated dollhouse workshop to one that doesn’t. Eventually we will build a room of some sort into the garage but for now I have a corner of the garage that doesn’t have all the storage and shelving I’m used to. Last weekend I was able to get it sort of organized…

When we moved, I got a bunch of see-through bins and tried to pack them in a logical way, since these will be the storage for all my supplies for the foreseeable future. Geoff pushed two tables together to give me a big workspace and I set up the houses in progress where I can reach them easily. The more finished houses are all upstairs in the house (kind of all over the place, though – no dedicated place to display them at the moment).

Time to test out this new setup with a new project! My parents are coming to visit in a couple of weeks and my mom and I are going to decorate faux gingerbread houses, which I will assemble and paint before she gets here. She makes real gingerbread houses every Christmas but we tried it here once and the air was too moist – the house basically caved in overnight. (Still yummy though!)

We’ll use these two Creatology puzzle house kits, which I bought at Michaels several years back. I don’t know if they’re still sold (if yes, they’re usually stocked in the spring/summer). I built the one on the right a while ago as a half scale cottage (the blog posts about that build are here if you’re curious). The one on the left, I haven’t done before.

We’ll be decorating with fake candy, also from Michaels. Most of it was 40% off in a “pre Black Friday” sale.

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