Some home made stuff

I suppose I should learn to call my home made stuff OOAK (one-of-a-kind) as does everyone else who sells this kind of thing for a small fortune.


I spent my last few days before flitting off to the States making bits and bobs in paper and was pleased to discover I had the knack and the patience to do it.

First Dolls House Fair

As soon as I bought the house I was off shopping for it.  I bought quite a bit of stuff from Dolls House Emporium and found a great doll's house shop in Bolton about half an hour from where I live.  Unfortunately a lot of what I rushed into buying doesn't work for one reason or another.  It has taken me a full six months to realise that you really have to apply the breaks and know precisely what it is you want and look for that.  It isn't rocket science if you think of it in real-life terms.  If you were buying for a new home it wouldn't be any use running around picking up stuff hither and yon because it caught your eye or you hadn't quite made up your mind about that particular room.  If you want to save yourself a lot of wasted money approach the miniature version in the same way.


Even my major purchase - the house itself - is probably not the best choice for me; but it has taken six months to realise it.  I have discovered as I've gone along that I would really like to work on a miniature rather than a doll's house.  The DHE house is good (although perhaps also more expensive than elsewhere) if you want a doll's house.  I now wish I'd bought a more realistic shell which I could clad in real bricks and roof tiles and drainpipes etc and create a realistic 1/12th model.  This is a big consideration before you even start.  I hadn't realised the possibility of it back in September.  Now I am this far down the line (May 2011) I know that everything needs thinking about in detail before galloping on.  This hobby is teaching me patience if nothing else.


On the 12th September I went to my first Dolls House Fair at Stafford.  It is quite a large one and therefore literally hundreds of thousands of objects to look at.  When you realise how long you can spend in a shop and then multiply this up by seventy plus traders you can imagine the time spent there.  Talk about a child in a sweet shop.  Stfford is one well worth doing again.

Job well done

9th September and finally the house and basement were built.

They were HUGE!!

Again it is all about three dimensions.  I am very poor at visualising the volume of an object - having its measurements isn't really enough and this was certainly a case in point.  The plan was for it to live in my office (aka the spare bedroom), probably on the chest of drawers.  It is massively tall and, worse than that, very deep - far too deep for the chest.  We did a quick scout round for the cheapest piece of furniture we could find to go under it.  After cobbling two Argos trolleys together it had a home but quite definitely it excluded any guests from the room.

I then spent the next couple of weeks chopping and changing my mind as to whether it was to be a period Georgian house or a modern one.  I suppose the final decision was something of a compromise.  It is to be a Georgian house lived in by a modern family. The basement is a family room and kitchen.  The ground floor is a formal dining room and sitting room and the family are collecting original Georgian pieces to furnish these rooms.  The next floor up is the teenage children's rooms.  The top floor is the master bedroom and bathroom where some Victorian period items have been kept and added stuff is in keeping - a bit shabby-chic come French country.  It isn't as muddled as it sounds and gives me a chance to work on a couple of historical periods.  I want to do them all but this will be my one and only folly I suspect - cost, time and space being against me.