One of the things she offered to us was a dollhouse, something I eventually wanted to get for Eliana! I was really excited until I saw it and then I seriously considered throwing it away.
(*sidenote: you can click on a picture in this post and see a slideshow of each picture in the post. They show up a little bigger!)
It was rickety, had dirty, bright yellow walls, a fake wood floor and a colored on bright red roof.
Not exactly what I was hoping for! But then after I brought it home, I looked over it carefully and began to hatch a plan in my mind to redo the house.
The house came with several dolls in hideous, mismatched, dirty clothes. They are now getting make-overs! Several of them have gotten/are getting new hair, newly painted faces and bodies and new clothes! This is taking a lot longer than I thought because it's hard to sew itty bitty clothes!
It also came with a lot of wooden furniture, several pieces of which needed to be glued together.
One day I asked Ben if he would like to work on the project with me and get it ready for her birthday. Surprisingly, he jumped on the idea and our special project was born!!
We've spent the last couple of weeks sanding, painting, re-roofing and more!
Without further ado, here is our special gift for a special girl!!
This is the "bathroom." It has a light gray printed wallpaper, new woodfloors and some cute little bathroom furniture!
This is the "kitchen." It has a pretty aqua colored wallpaper, a table and chairs, a stove and a couple other pieces of furniture. Grandma and Grandpa doll don't need too much re-doing so they are allowed in the house already:)
The new roof! Ben put wooden shingles on the whole roof and we painted it a really pretty blue-gray color (it looks really blue in the picture but it's not as blue in person.)
The bedroom. There's a little kitty sleeping on the bed:) I still have to make new bedding for the bed!
Here is the bedroom; with 2 shades of pink wall paper. The actual wallpaper for a dollhouse was really expensive so I bought several sheets of scrapbooking paper and used my craft glue and some careful measuring and voila! Wallpaper!
And the living room. This has a pretty green wallpaper and little wall picture. This is one of the dolls that I redid. She got new hair and new clothes. She really needed it! (in the above pic of all the dolls, she was the one with the red and white outfit on the right.)
The floors took me several days to do but I am SO glad that I did them. The old floors were so dull and I really wanted wood floors. To buy wood floors for a dollhouse is at least $13 a piece and I would've needed to buy 3-4! Instead, since this was a budget project, I used some brown craft paint I already had, bought a couple more (to mix colors) and a coating for the finish.
First I painted the floors a couple of times. Then I marked out all of the planks with pencil, then with a special permanent marker pen and then put 2 coats of finish on it to give it a semi-gloss. I like it!
The shingles aren't perfect because some weren't perfectly straight but I think Ben did an awesome job! And it looks way better than it did before. We decided if we can't have our own house, we can have fun fixing up a dollhouse:)
Eliana has seen us fixing it up little by little but hasn't been allowed to play with it til today! We set up all the furniture last night and brought her down to play this morning.
She said, "House!!" and got down immediately and started checking out the dolls, putting them in the bathtub or in bed and moving around furniture. She spent a lot of time playing with it today!
We still have a few finishing touches: some rugs, a few more pieces of furniture sometime, the remaining dolls who are still getting beautified and maybe even a little lighting someday!
All in all, it costed about $30 for supplies to fix up a free dollhouse. Not bad!! We're so happy she has something to play with and that we could put a lot of time and love into fixing it up for her.
We'll probably have just as much fun playing with it as she will:)
1 comment:
It looks awesome! I can't believe Ben put on all of those shingles and you drew on the wood planks- you need to remind Eliana of this when she's 15!!
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