Category: Dollhouse Redux

We’re restoring a family heirloom, the dollhouse made for my husband’s grandmother when she was a little girl. Click here to see all the posts about our Dollhouse Redux Project.

We may not have finished painting the dollhouse, but we’ve started restoring furniture and making dollhouse accessories. One project we’ve been working on is a small photo book featuring photos of our daughter and her friends.

At 1.5″ x 2″ it’s small by our standards, but that makes it oversized for the dollhouse. A cute coffee table book perhaps?

Here’s what we did:

We picked some favorite photos and resized them to 1.5″ x 2″ in Photoshop. We then placed two of them side by side in a new image template that was 3″ x 2″ inches. These two pictures would be placed next to each other in the book.

We then printed and cut out around both of the images (not separating them!) for each set of photos.

We folded each set of two photos in half (with the images towards each other, the blank white pages on the outside), then glued them back to back from one page to the next in order to make a book. We glued the cover on top (just one 1.5″ x 2″ photo) with the title of our little book, and pasted a back cover of the same size to the reverse side of the last book page.

Ta da! A small picture book that’s child sized for our daughter’s dollhouse.

She so enjoyed working on this project: selecting the photos for the book, gluing it together, and now reading it over and again.

Next up: a series of coffee table books? I think we need one featuring our family.

Our daughter thinks we need one featuring the dollhouse people’s family. But of course! Why didn’t I think of that?!

Earlier this week six pounds of dollhouse furniture arrived in a giant box from my mother-in-law in New Mexico.

Our daughter loved unwrapping and playing with each item that had belonged to her great-grandmother. In fact, many of items were handmade, making them even more special for our family.

Now we’re beginning the process of cleaning and lovingly restoring much of the furniture.

Last night’s project involved some cute chairs and pink paint and that’s all I’m going to say about THAT until the big reveal. Stay tuned…

We’re restoring a family heirloom, the dollhouse made for my husband’s grandmother when she was a little girl. Click here to see all the posts about our Dollhouse Redux Project.

The mad dash for dollhouse furnishings has begun. While on a shopping trip in Berkeley we spied these adorable wire ornaments at CB2 that happen to be miniature modern chairs:

Costing $4 a chair, they are significantly less expensive than other modern chair options and super cute. Score!

We’re restoring a family heirloom, the dollhouse made for my husband’s grandmother when she was a little girl. Click here to see all the posts about our Dollhouse Redux Project.

David’s been busy painting the dollhouse using Mythic zero-voc paint:

While the paint is drying, I thought I’d share some more fun dollhouse decorating ideas. Here are some DIY ideas that I find particularly inspiring:

Featured above:
1. HeyDay Living Dollhouse
I love the craft papered walls contrasted with the bright green paint, those framed little craft silhouette stickers and how she printed out the image of a chandelier from the internet and glued it to the wall. Brilliant!

2. Lonny Dollhouse
Elegant painted stripes. Couldn’t be much easier than that!

3. Lonny Magazine Feature
This particular photograph isn’t of a dollhouse, but a little girls room. I think giant, over-sized photographs of our daughter above a bed would be such fun in her dollhouse!

4 and 5. Atelier Dollhouse Project
Look at this intricate faux tile floor made with textured cardstock and paint! Love the finished product. Now would I have patience to work on that particular project? Maybe our daughter would. LOL!

(images obtained via Pinterest)

We’re restoring a family heirloom, the dollhouse made for my husband’s grandmother when she was a little girl. Click here to see all the posts about our Dollhouse Redux Project.

We spent yesterday in negotiations over what color we should paint the dollhouse roof.

To refresh your memory, here is the current state of the roof:

Originally I wanted to go with a sage green (mostly so we could use the leftover paint to repaint our kitchen chairs; you know, have a two-for-one type project). Our daughter wanted purple. We decided to do a quick mock up with Photoshop to see what the roof might look like.

Good thing we did this mock up because neither of us liked the colors we had originally picked!

We ended up agreeing, fittingly enough, on a color that’s a variation on the red roof we already have: the Red Delicious color that’s part of the Land of Nod collection by the non-toxic paint company (and locally available), Mythic Paints, shown above as #6.

What do you think? What would you have picked?
(If it were only up to me, I would have gone with #1. Love that magenta!)