Hello friends! I finally remembered to actually take pictures while doing crafts, so I'm going to give a rough overview of my big current project. A little over a month ago, I found this KidKraft house at Savers. The roof was peeling up a little bit, and there were some stickers on it, but it was still in very sturdy condition, and for only $5, well worth it. Here's the house before I did anything to it:
I am a sucker for KidKraft houses in general-- they're sturdy, they have functional pieces, and there's no unwieldy folding elements (looking at you, Barbie). This house is pretty small for KidKraft, but since this is my first real renovation project, I think that's a good thing. The door swings open and shut, as you can see, and the windows actually slide open and shut too! The plastic bed swings up to turn into a shelf, which I think is a nice play feature, but not something I'm going to use. The only other notable thing is the sink, which is adorable, and that's about it.
I debated what type of dollhouse theme to go with, and somehow I landed on "Indie Trash House." My vision is an only semi-livable house with a basement that the owner has converted into a DIY music stage. Everything will be a little bit grimy and covered in posters. I decided on this partly because it gives me a good excuse to not be a perfectionist (I made lots of mistakes while painting the walls, for instance, but would a DIY punk fix the wall?) and also because I have a decent amount of experience visiting these kinds of venues (I contain multitudes). From there, I made a healthy Pinterest board of ideas and a rough mockup in ClipStudio Paint and got to work.
The first thing I did was put masking tape along the edges of any wooden pieces that touched the walls, and covered it in a slathering of gesso. For anyone thinking of renovating a dollhouse, I would actually caution you against this. The masking tape was difficult and time-consuming to apply, and generally didn't make that much of a difference. I would recommend just painting the edges first very carefully. Anyway, then I mixed up a gray to cover the entire bottom floor in, and a tan color for the bathroom. In the bedroom, I went over the gesso again with white paint. I also put a few coats of white paint on the doors and windows, which I jokingly called the "landlord special," but the paint was very difficult to apply there and I'm still working on making it prettier, so please do not judge me too harshly in the photos later.
Next, I used popsicle sticks to make wooden floorboards for the bedroom. These actually turned out fantastic and I am over the moon about them. I used my utility blade to cut them to size, and then glued them to the gessoed floor with wood glue. (Wood glue is my favorite glue in the whole wide world.) After that, I went over with a few coats of watery paint to emulate a wood stain, and it worked pretty perfectly! Since the built-in bed swings up, it was pretty easy to make the floorboards go under it. I only covered the part that I knew would be visible, so it does look a bit silly under there. I've been told I should put an easter egg down there, but I'm not sure what.
For the stage, I have these adorable little wooden pallets. While I wish I could take credit for them, I actually just found them at the dollar store and used watered down paint to make them look scuffed up and old. I'm still deciding what kind of gear they're going to have, but rest assured it will be a jumble of wires and guitar pedals. The entryway has a basic little shelf I made out of cardboard, which I built roughly to size by measuring the area, and cutting the pieces so they would fit together using joins in the middle. (I can't remember the name of it, but it's the one where you cut halfway across each piece and push them together in the middle. It is possibly called a halved joint, but I don't know woodworking terms.)
In the pictures, you will also notice there are posters up on the walls, but only black and white ones so far. This is because I haven't gone to the library yet to use their color printer, so I printed what I could at home. I folded and creased a few of them to give some extra texture, and some others I put a layer of tape over to give it a more poster-like sheen. I think they look nice so far, although using rolled up tape to stick them to the walls doesn't seem to be the best option (the tape keeps bubbling up and pushing the posters away from the walls) but I haven't found a better solution yet. Perhaps it's time to invest in double sided tape.
Since this is a music venue, the first instrument I made was a guitar. It is a Telecaster specifically. I just feel like these types tend to have them. I made a template by tracing over a picture of a guitar, then cut out the template and used it to trace many more guitar shapes on heavy paper and glue them together. I tried to replicate the form of an actual guitar, so the body is more layers than the neck, and the neck is slightly rounded by using smaller strips in the back. I sanded the edges, put some beads on for the knobs, and painted it. I added a coat of clear nail polish on the body to give it a bit more sheen, which I like, but I might do more layers if I were to do it again-- or acquire some actual gloss finish. The strings are just pieces of thread that I delicately glued on each end, and the pegs are pieces of wire that I bent into roughly the right shape with pliers. Overall, I'm very happy with how it came out, and I'm working on an acoustic guitar to go with it, and pondering making some guitar stands as well.
Miscellaneous things, my beloved! I also found this cork board piece at the dollar store (I looked hard because I knew I wanted one) and I cut it in half and added some aluminum foil on the edges. The foil is actually wrapped around a cardstock frame that I cut to size, and then I glued the whole thing down and smoothed it out as best I could. I'm pretty pleased with it, and I'm just waiting on some library color printing to fill it with aesthetically pleasing junk. I can't really say the same for the little mirror I tried to salvage from this flip-out brush-- even though I tried to loosen the glue with a hairdryer, it just cracked instead of popping out. I may have to just buy a piece of glass from the internet for my bathroom. And finally, I made a few weed related items for the dolls. The only ones that have turned out well are the ashtray, pipe, and rolling tray. The ashtray and pipe are just air dry clay that I still have to paint, and the rolling tray is a piece of plastic packaging that I cut out and painted. It looks quite cute I think.
