Doll House Miniatures

I started collecting dollhouse miniatures when I was eight years old because I liked my friend E's dollhouse (You know... the friend who kept drowning?) My first dollhouse was made for me by my parents. It was a large wooden box, stained dark brown, with two shelves (which made 3 floors) and crookedly sawed out windows and a door. I loved it! My mother wallpapered it with wrapping paper and helped make a lot of my earlier pieces. I think she enjoyed it as much as I did. I continued to collect miniatures throughout college and still have two (sadly neglected) room boxes and one (equally neglected) dollhouse in my current home.

I always worked in one inch scale (or "an inch to a foot") which is the most common dollhouse scale in the USA. What that means is that anything that would normally be a foot long in "real life" is an inch long in the dollhouse. When I was younger, the miniatures I had weren't always to scale because, although most of my items were store bought or professionally made, some items were made by my mother, some were made by a neighbor, and some were just found items. But many of my original items were to scale, and I still have a lot of them today.

In high school, several friends liked my house and decided they wanted to collect miniatures too. My best friend (whom I'd known since I was 1 year old -we were neighbors) even took an internship at a dollhouse store. She bought a kit (Duracraft I think) and started to build a really large 10 room house. She assembled most of it, the main structure anyway, but never quite finished it. Several years later we had the following conversation:

HER

I need to get rid of some stuff. What do you want of mine?

ME

I don't know... clothes? Or um... that frog over there? I don't know. I have no idea. I really don't need anything.

HER

Yes you do. Think big.

ME

Bookshelves?

HER

No. What do you really want of mine?

(I was confused. I really wanted bookshelves! Then I realized...)

ME

Oh my gosh... your dollhouse??!!!

HER

Yes! Take it out of here, do whatever you want with it. I'm sick of looking at it. Finish it, paint it, wallpaper it, anything you want. Keep it as long as you'd like. One or ten years, I don't care. My only requirement is that when you don't want it anymore, even if it's ten years from now, you promise to give it back to me and not get rid of it some other way.

I never jumped on a deal so fast in my life!

I kept her house for many years. I wallpapered it, carpeted it, painted it blue with white trim, and installed electricity. I never used electricity in any of my houses, but I always installed it because ideally the wiring should to go under wallpaper and flooring. So it's better to install electrical wiring in a dollhouse and not use it, than to not install it and decide you want it later!

I had a great time with that house, and returned it to her many years later. I kept my furniture, but she got back a finished, wallpapered, electrified house. -Then she got married and gave birth to two boys! ;)

I don't think I ever took pictures of the exterior of that house (aka "The Blue House"), but I still have some photos of the interior rooms. -Guess what I'll be posting throughout the next few weeks? ;)