Introducing the Dollhouse Series

When I retired from teaching in 1995, I found a little book about collecting and creating miniatures, miniatures rooms, and doll houses.  I found the book at the library book sale and it started my head spinning. I have always, since childhood, been fascinated by pretty rooms be they in magazine pictures, real life, or in doll houses.  I remember helping my good friend, Judy, create a room for her art class when we were in college.  I loved it!  However, little free time, family life, and teaching never allowed me the luxury of hobby times.

So with those retirement hours and my new little book, I began looking about at sales and hobby stores for miniatures I could create.  The first Christmas I created three small room box houses for my grandchildren, each of them based on a different children's book.  I loved them.  The little ones were interested in their new presents for a little bit.

I, however, just couldn't stop collecting little pieces wherever I found them:   hobby shops, yard sales, thrift stores, I even found a miniature wholesaler who had twice a year warehouse sales!  I couldn't stop myself !
I had great fun making personalized room boxes for everyone.  The rooms included their own miniaturized pictures, their hobbies, their interests.  I had people order them as gifts.   But the day did come where everyone I was related to, and those who were friends had had enough!  I was forbidden to make one more doll house or room for the grandchildren.  My two granddaughters had a room in their house that they called "Doll- landia", and those tiny people living therein lived quite the soap opera lives created inside the girls' heads.  They each created a new room box house every year when they visited in the summers.

Five years ago we moved and I was "encouraged" by husband to clean out the craft room and its many shelves, so that we did not have to move all of it.  So I did a great cleaning and organizing that left us with shelves in our new storage shed and garage.  Shortly after we moved, I had to have eye surgery to control my worsening glaucoma, so husband was certain that miniature-making wasn't a good hobby.  So I did have a sale and cleared out much of my miniature supply.

At about this time there was an ad in our local paper that someone wanted to sell their hand -constructed doll house.  Of course, I had to go see it.  And it was lovely.  The lady had made it herself in the 1960's.  She was now in her late 80's, and felt that she had to downsize her living space, so she wanted to sell her
large doll house.  She had wired it for electricity and made most of the furniture.   I fell in love.  Of course, I bought it.  We kept it lit as sort of a night light in the craft room-office, and I moved things about, added to it, subtracted from it.

But then, when my mother-in-law needed care and had to move to our house, we changed the office into her bedroom.  So, what were we to do with this large doll house?  I solved the problem by packing all the furniture away in storage, taking off the detachable roof, and using the doll house as a very unique bedside table.  The front of the house opened as double doors, and I simply used the inside to store my reading materials.  I rather liked it.

But with my recent writings about childhood memories, I decided to redo the doll house as sort of a composite of all the rental houses in which we had ever lived.  And that was quite a few.  When I was born, my parents were trying to recover from the depression.  I was the youngest of five children, and money was not plentiful.  During my years from birth to getting married, I lived in nine different rental homes.

I must say that none of the nine houses looked anything like the doll house.  It is much grander looking.  After all, our family had five children and a stinky dog.  It wasn't easy to find a rental.  And we were a happy family, but there was never enough money!  The doll house has four levels, and we never had more than two.
They do not make doll house furniture as ugly as some of ours.  My dad sold furniture during my first five years of life, and much of ours must have been Sears and Roebuck rejects.  But what I have included in my childhood memory doll house are some of the objects that remind me of my childbood and all our daily activities.

Above you see the picture of the outside of my childbood- memory doll house.  I plan future entries where I will introduce you to each room inside, and let the reader in on some of my childhood stories.  Many of the stories are a repeat of earlier blog entries, but in a shorter form.  I hope the reader enjoys.