How Did I Get Here?: My latest Doll House

I finished another doll house. I went to my nephew's baby shower and asked if anyone has mentioned giving the baby a doll house yet. They said no and would love to have me build one. I had been wanting to try a Real Toys house from Hobby Lobby and had the perfect one in mind. After seeing their new house and how it was decorated, my color ideas went out the window. My nephew' wife suggested I try to make it look like theirs. So I started building before the baby was born. This kit is different from the vintage kits. Mostly everything is precut and made out of MDF. It was like a great big puzzle.

Little did I know that this one would take me over a year to build. I ran into a few mistakes that discouraged me and then I was displaced from my work space. I work on these houses in the basement and when we decided to pull up all the carpet, my work table ended up in the corner with stuff piled on it. We then decided to plan our basement bathroom before we put the new floor down so everything has been piled high for a long time.

My first mistake was wallpapering the wrong walls. You will see the paper doesn't face each other in the same room. I later found out I wasn't supposed to put in the walls until the very end!

I had to get out the steamer and steam the paper off. I then had to run to the hobby store and buy more paper. I was so worried they wouldn't have it because I had bought it months before. What luck! They had one piece left of each design.

I started working on the house upstairs since we have the downstairs torn up. I would store it in the bedroom when I wasn't working on it.

I would then haul everything to the kitchen when I was working on it. There was a lot of painting involved.

I hand stained each individual shingle. This was very tedious. I could have stained after they were glued onto the house but there was a warning that the shingles might curl up when staining. I didn't want that to happen. I decided not to stain all of them since it looked like there were more shingles than needed.