The Dollhouse That Mom Built

In the 70’s, my Mom bought a huge Dura-Craft Victorian VH600 dollhouse kit. When she got it home & opened Up the box she was surprised by all of the thousands of pieces of wood! Nothing was pre-assembled. Every wall, staircase, window & door needed to be put together. The instruction manual detailed the process step-by-step. She set-up a work space & started at it. For years she plugged away on that project, until it was finally completed! It had lights & wallpaper & everything!

 It moved with us from California to Oregon. When we relocated to Seattle, it stayed with my Mom’s best friend. I remember thinking it was so cute displayed behind the couch in her living room! When she moved, it was returned to my Mom and was placed in her family room. Fast forward about 25 years.....when my Mom gave it to my daughter last October. 

The house didn’t look too bad on the outside. A few missing roof shingles and several missing spindles & railings. It was a bit dirty too. So we took it outside & started cleaning it. We removed the front bay windows in preparation for a new paint color!

 
Inside of the house was another story!

 The wallpaper had seriously aged over the years! You could also see the copper wiring through the wallpaper, which had corroded in some spots.  We removed all the wallpaper. Even though several lights on the house still worked, we did some research & realized that we could no longer get lights or replacement bulbs for the  “vintage” electrical system. That was the hardest thing for me to remove because, as a child, I remember my Mom working on the lighting & I was fascinated by it. I was always so excited when a new light was working! All that hand soldered copper wiring that she worked so hard on was sadly removed.

The wood slat floor in the living room was buckled & curling in several spots. At first I thought I could just repair the floor, but in the end we scraped out all the slats & dried out glue and decided to put in a new wood floor. 

My next post will continue the saga. Priming & painting :)

Where Have I Been???

I can't believe it's been almost 5 years since my last post!! I would never have guessed all the changes that have taken place over the years!  I'll just summarize by saying we moved to Oregon and I've added a new hobby to my life ... miniatures!  I still love paper crafting & seem to always have some paper project in the works. I also still love Close to My Heart stamps & supplies. But I have fallen hard for all things miniature over the past year! I wanted to document the project I'm working on, so I thought I'd use my blog to do so.  My daughter inherited a huge dollhouse from my Mom and we've been working on restoring it.  I'll be posting about it going forward.  And I'm sure I'll throw in a few paper projects along the way! ;)