Dollhouse plans

This is the thing I will want to share with the world.

I've been working on this idea for the last week. A friend of mine has a beautiful dollhouse, which I've admired, but I haven't been that interested in that stuff myself. It's just not my style. I love crafting, and the small scale would be perfect for me. I tend to start making a thing, and then forget about it well before getting halfway through. Dollhouse stuff is small projects, completed in a few hours, and I might complete some of that stuff. But nah, I just don't feel like having that kind of thing in my home.

Then I saw this. It's an absolutely gorgeous dollhouse in a tree, and is kinda old-fashioned in style. And I started, just for the hell of it, sketching plans for a house of my own. And I was doing that the next day too. I realised that I actually wanted a dollhouse of my own. Not a premade one, not a boring normal house. A fantastic, rustic tree stump house.

And a week later I'm still planning. I've got the core building pretty much planned. I'm pretty confident about throwing together a lighting system from LEDs. There's some things I can't figure out until I got the whole thing in front of me, but the bulk of the planning is ready. I've spent a lot of my free time figuring out sizes of windows, stairs, doors and everything in between.

I did a mockup of the dollhouse with SketchUp, and boy was it useful. In my plans I hadn't taken into account that the room height would be slightly less than planned, since I hadn't planned for it when deciding on the height of the whole thing. It isn't an issue in the bottom floor living room, where there are no dividing walls, but it does matter with pantry and bathroom walls. Don't mind the wall textures in the picture, those aren't going to be the actual ones! I just threw something on there to make it look a bit less blueprint-y-

The final shape is not going to be a rectancle with a slanted roof, of course. I'm going to cover the box with styrox or chicken wire and paper mache to make it more round and more like a tree stump. The one concern I have for now is the front of the house. I'm going to give it a front with hinges so that it won't get too dusty inside. I'm going to attach it with hinges. Ok, no problem in a rectancular box... but it is an issue when I add stuff on the outside. I was wondering if I would make a detachable section for the corner where the hinges go, so that when I'm opening it, I can take it off and things won't break when the front moves, and when the house is closed, it will look better with it on. The outside will get on only after I have the box built and the lights in, and to get the lights in neatly, I might need to do the inside surfaces first. So it's not an immediate issue, but it is something I need to solve sooner or later!

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#planning #dollhouse