This is a lovely quarter scale dollhouse kit with three floors. It stands just over 8 inches and 6 1/2 inches wide. It is made of laser cut wood and comes complete with two floors of embossed, Craftsman style flower wainscoting and Nouveau trim for it's outside. My intent is to make it a front opener!
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Bashing the Mulberry Even Before it Arrives!
Of course I had my own vision for the kit, even before it arrived, and thank goodness Michelle of Michelle’s Miniatures was kind enough to make me a custom, full sized back, so I could make it a front opening dollhouse. I emailed her a pdf I made of the specifics of what I thought I needed:
The PDF I sent Michelle to outline the "back" I needed.
I asked that she leave the floors uncut, so I could place the staircases where I wanted them, I would cut the openings myself. And smart woman she is, Michelle left the flower embossing on the 1st floor walls, despite my direction that I didn’t need it. Boy was I wrong on that one as you will see later in my posts!
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The Kit Arrives! Be Prepared For Small!
These little home kits sometimes come in large envelopes or small book boxes! Usually they fit right in the mailbox. Always a shocker for me but convenient for the maker I bet!
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| You can see the custom back Michelle created in the upper right. |
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Planning the Bash
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| I'm an old fashioned girl and need graph paper! |
I planned to move the staircases to the sides of the home, to take up less interior space. Once I took a thorough look at the kit I realized I didn’t want the 1st floor to have two rooms, it would have one long expanse, and a fireplace. For the 2nd floor, if I moved the stairs to the back wall, I could create what looked like a hallway that would have openings to two rooms. This required graft paper. I laid out the 2nd floor and planned for the change.
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Poke Out the Windows!
The kit has these wonderful block windows. It was tedious, but fun, to poke them all out. I figured the little leftover cubes would make great baby blocks in the 1/4 scale world!
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Staining the Wainscoting
it took a couple of coats of stain to get the depth of color I wanted. Whilst I was doing that I had to figure out how I was going to accent those lovely Craftsman flowers!
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| Left-prestain. Upper and right-first coats |
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Detail Oriented
I wanted crisp flower reliefs on the wainscoting so I experimented with media I had on hand, a gold and bronze Sharpie. Believe it or not, with gentle pressure, they worked really well in getting that lovely patina I was looking for. I had to go over the wainscoting with them a couple of times, but it was enjoyable for me, as it became somewhat mindless as I listened to some Ravel, Satie and Debussy (if it was a mid century dollhouse I would have listed to Dave Brubeck!).
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| Left-without Sharpie treatment. Right-with Sharpie treatment. |
I then applied a couple of coats of water based poly and those walls really started to glow!
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Making Sure It All Shows
The disappointing thing about the Mulberry kit is the bottom of the 1st floor wainscoting is cut off when you glue the wall sides to the the sides of the floor. Such lovely relief detail is lost!
To remedy this I took some trim and glued it to the sides of the floor, so the walls could sit on top of this trim and show their full glory when the house was glued up! I left the front of the floor untrimmed as the front opening wall piece will have the trim for that.
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Stairs, Stairs, Stairs!
I felt the width of the 1st floor stairs were too wide for my purposes, so I cut all the treads down. It was a pretty simple glue up once I found the right width of trim (I should have cut down the treads to fit the trim instead! I was lucky to find some trim that was just the right width!).
I decided the stairs being see through was going to be an asset, so I didn’t back the treads. The 2nd floor stairs, I didn’t even make a set of treaded stairs. These "stairs" were going to be on the back wall, and no one would see them, so why make a full set of stairs?
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Getting There!
After all that, 10 days have gone by! But I’m pretty pleased with the project so far!
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