Weekend Project...

I had big plans to make Miss B something awesome for Christmas this year. It was a little dollhouse for peg dolls that I saw here. I liked that it could be disassembled and stored flat, and that there was a lot of room for creativity in decorating it and such.

All of my good intentions went unfollowed though, as I never could find someone who had a router I could borrow, and the whole busy Holiday Season and having a newborn put a damper on my homemade gift making anyway. I like to imagine myself having great skills at woodworking, but really don't know much about it. I'd love to learn, but right now we all know that my specialty is cardboard and tape anyway.

We recently bought a farmhouse bench for our kitchen, and the box it came in was made of double thick cardboard. This gave me and idea, and I set out to make the dollhouse out of a medium I was more comfortable with.

I started out making the base. It is made of layers of the double thick cardboard glued together and then taped around the edges to smooth things out. First two 12 1/2 inch squares of cardboard for the bottom of the base, and then four six inch squares (again, made of two layers of the cardboard glued and taped together) which were glued onto the larger base, leaving a half inch groove between the smaller squares. I used a couple of textbooks to weight down the cardboard while the glue was setting.

Next came the walls, which I cut from two more 12 1/2 inch squares (making the walls 12 and a half inches wide by 6 1/4 inch tall). I cut a door in each side of each wall piece, and a groove in the middle. One wall has the groove in the bottom, and the other has it in the top. The grooves are a half inch wide.

The two pieces slide together to make a t shape that will fit into the grooves of the base. The "boards" are really very sturdy, but lightweight, and the whole house can be taken apart for storage if need be.

Here is the house all set up. By the time I had it this far, I had to stop working on it because Miss B just wanted to play with it. Here are some pics of it while she was playing with it.

The kitchen. A sharpie transformed some of our old (and beat up) blocks into a fridge, stove and sink for the kitchen. Some of the soon to be painted peg dolls are enjoying a meal off of their button plates at the table.

It's family movie night in the living room with a block couch and widescreen TV. I have plans to spiff up some of the blocks and make better furniture for the dollhouse, but for now Miss B is pretty happy with it.

The bedrooms with Sharpie enhanced dressers, block beds and blankets made from scraps of fleece. The boys discovered that B's finger puppets fit nicely over the peg dolls too, so now there can be pets such as the bunny above.I started work on painting the peg dolls yesterday, and Miss B has been pretending with them already. It's so cute to hear her make the Mom and Dad dolls call the B doll "sweetie". All in all, I think it was a worthwhile way to spend a few hours yesterday. It was a great way to recycle some of the cardboard, and didn't cost me anything but time and supplies we had on hand to make. If B gets tired of playing with it or it or it gets ruined, it can be tossed into the recycle bin pretty easily or just broken down and stored until she is interested again. It's also very sturdy, so I don't think it will be getting trashed anytime soon.

I have also started decorating the house using scrapbooking paper and modge podge to cover the walls and the floors. I will post some more pics when I get it all completed. It's already looking much better with the masking tape covered up with the scrapbooking paper.

I may even add a second floor addition at some future point, if she keeps playing with it regularly.