The Mini House Project

As children, growing up in the 1970's, my sister and I shared a much loved dolls house.

Mr and Mrs Bender lived there with their children Tommy and Sally. Probably socially inappropriate today, their surname was down to the flexible wire in their legs, which would pop out of the back of their knees, if you bent their legs the wrong way.  We did that rather a lot. It was a novelty. Our own small legs only bent one way. Unless you count the time, when aged 10,  I was doing hobby horse jumps in the back garden and ripped a ligament in my left knee. Then, and only then, I understood what we had put the Bender Family through.

The Benders owned the smallest bar of pink plastic soap I’d ever seen, which kept getting vacuumed up, when we carelessly and frequently lost it in our bedroom carpet pile. It had to be regularly rescued by our long suffering Mother from the Hoover bag, to placate her two sobbing infants, and four small, unwashed, rubber people.

Having no children between us, our beloved dolls house has been handed on over the years to various extended family children and I suspect the Bender Family have relocated to the Big Dolls House in the Sky.

I'm all grown up now, on the surface, but secretly I wish it was still mine.

So when I spotted a dilapidated dolls house in a local antique centre, looking for a new home, I bought it.

It wasn't old or handmade, as ours had been. It was a modern flat-pack kit based on a Victorian house, which someone had attempted to put together and furnish. Rather badly, and in an enthusiastically "gluey" fashion.

I thought I would do it up, for fun. But that wasn't really a challenge, when you can buy anything your heart desires, ready made, for dolls houses nowadays.

One evening, while contemplating how to strip the weird, green, brick patterned paper off the exterior, I had an idea. Why not try to make it, or the interior at least, look like the inside of our life-size Victorian cottage, which my husband, pooch and I have renovated over the past 8 years?

And so it started.

Turning the Mini House into No.1. Heatherside Corner.

This blog follows the successes and failures of the project....

The Mini House arrives at No.1 Heatherside Corner