So....here's the next post about the dollhouse I showed detailing of a few weeks ago. This dollhouse is so amazing, it's taken me 18 years to make it! Ha! Okay, the truth is that when I was a little girl I loved houses. I would sketch houses and floor plans, rearrange my room every 3 weeks, and build "dollhouses" cobbled together from anything I could find - shoe boxes, pieces of cardboard or wood, etc. If I was with my mom and we had to kill time I would ask her to drive me around neighborhoods to look at the houses. When I turned 12 my mom gave me this amazing dollhouse kit as a way of encouraging my interest. She had no idea (skill-wise) what she was getting me beyond what the salesperson told her and what the box said, but we were both excited about it. I started trying to make it and got as far as assembling the base and laying the hardwood floors on the base level. Beyond that point I realized I needed a few things: a framing square (still not sure what that one is), a hack or coping saw, and 18 years of life experience. It was too difficult for me to do by myself, my mom was coping with her recent divorce, and money was tight so I didn't want to ask for those additional things I needed. So I put the whole thing under my bed and that was that! After approximately 15 moves and a few big life changes, it was finally time to complete the dollhouse.
It was so much fun to pick out the wallpaper and paint colors, and that's about where the fun ended (at least for a little while). I roped Grant into helping and our marriage was tested many, many times (kidding!). He threatened at least once to catch the whole thing on fire.
Our jobs turned out to be divided into:
Grant - chief engineer/head contractor (and much of the sanding work)
Courtney - painter, wallpaper hanger, flooring expert, porch builder, ladder maker, roofer, and bricklayer
The houses was coming along but we reached a point where Grant really wanted to take a back seat in the project (ha! what's farther back than the back seat he was already sitting in?!). Would we ever finish the dollhouse? Will our marriage survive? Check back soon to see!
(I know this looks pretty close to finished but there's still the roof, the attic floor, wallpapering the attic, painting the second and attic floors, and trim and molding everywhere on the inside and outside!)
2 comments:
ha ha, that sounds almost as difficult as building a real house from scratch! I've always loved dollhouses too. My dad built one for me when I was little that looked like the house we lived in. I'm even more grateful for it now that I know how much work it takes!
Good luck on it - it looks great so far!
Well, I'm reading the blogs from latest to earliest and I just realized I can't add....I said 16 years in the last comment and it has been 18. I feel so sad I didn't get you the things you needed to finish this and I wish I had known how hard it was to do...you are right...I just knew you loved house designs and wanted to encourage it in you. I'm so proud of you for finishing this. It looks beautiful and was well worth waiting for!
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