Brand New Dollhouse

I've been getting taunted daily by all of the modern dollhouse that making an appearance on the internet lately. I love them, ALL of them! So I woke up inspired today and determined to build a fabulous modern house. Fortunately the temperature today was a fantastic 60+ degrees. Now, we don't own power tools (or any tools really except for a hammer, several screwdrivers and a Dremel), so building this house was a brain teaser. I had some scraps of wood that I swiped from the Home Depot throw away bin and a collection of various Home Depot Kids Clinic projects that had been mutilated by overzealous children. I figured somewhere in all of those random pieces a dollhouse lurked. I would say it was more like doing a logic puzzle than actually constructing anything. I did not cut any of the wood, but I did have to use the Dremel to shave of a few millimeters from a couple of pieces. Originally I was going to sketch out the different pieces and try to put a design on paper, but that didn't work out so well. So, I just winged it!

The big girls helped dismantle some of the pieces. Jena pulled out the nails and Ashni sanded all the rough edges.

These are the pieces that we had to choose from. There were lots of nails, but fortunately no trips to the ER for tetanus shots.

Here it is pretty much completely constructed. The white door on the front slides. I used some pieces from a message board that had a track to slide the white board in. The door is actually a piece of the white board.

Jena helped out a lot. She's good at getting her hands into tight spaces and she's very enthusiastic about creating things. She was out in the garage pulling out nails before I could even get out there.

Completed paint job. The little trees came from out bush outside. It smells very piney. The little planter is from a perpetual calendar that we made a couple of months ago.

Notice the sleek modern fireplace complete with photo of Miles Davis!





The kids couldn't wait to furnish their new house. So now, they have this house with the living room and dining room and they've put all of the beds in the barn that we found yesterday.

We have retired the cardboard dollhouse. It hasn't been discarded, but it has been relocated to their closet. I'm sure it will still get plenty of use.