a dollhouse for two both

Twin and I made a dollhouse. Eeee! It's the Coventry Cottage from Greenleaf. I have been contemplating these dollhouse kits for the past couple years, thinking it would be really fun, but also worried people would think I am a little crazy. Seeing as I already play with dolls and am a grown woman with no children. However, when I mentioned it to Twin she just said "That sounds fun!" as I knew, of course, she would. Because she's cool like that.

We spent two weekends on the house. The first weekend, we stained, primed, and assembled the main parts of the house. We also painted both interior and exterior. These kits are not for the faint-hearted. Luckily Twin and I have great attention to detail (aka nitpicking perfectionism), so this was great fun for us. I can see how some people get really into miniatures. And there are people who are really into miniatures. I browsed a few dollhouse forums online and these people are serious. I could totally see myself being one of those people.

The second weekend, we shingled the house, put together the furniture, and made all the interior furnishings.

The Coventry Cottage is one of Greenleaf's smaller kits, just two rooms downstairs and an attic. We made the upstairs a bedroom. You can see here that we never got around to shingling the back sections of the roof. We ran out of time, you see. But we'll get to it.

In the living room, we wallpapered one wall with some William Morris wrapping paper that I have had forever. We didn't really know what we were doing, so we just slapped it on with Mod Podge. Is there anything that Mod Podge can't do?

Almost all of the furniture was included in the kit, though we did pick up a few little pieces from a local craft shop. The cuckoo clock is one of my favorite details. I want a cuckoo clock in my real house one day.

The kitchen got red gingham curtains and a cheerful tablecloth. The men in our lives have been very supportive of our dollhouse efforts, good men. Matt even found the Shaker cabinet at the craft store and brought it home to us. I love it.

Twin made the teeny tiny cushions for the easy chairs. She concluded that sewing tiny cushions is challenging, and sewing tiny, perfectly round cushions is nearly impossible. And yet they look perfect. We ruminated on the best method of hanging curtains for quite a while and then ended up just hot-gluing them straight to the wall. Seemed to work just fine.

And below is a slideshow with a bunch of in-progress pictures. We aren't crazy, are we? Or maybe we're just crazy in a good way. I'm gonna go with that.


Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.