I recently bought this giant scratch-built dollhouse off Facebook Marketplace. It cost £12 but it wouldn’t fit in my car so it cost another £10 for me to bring it home in a taxi!
It’s huge and impractical and, as much as my children love it, I’m going to have to sell it on when I’ve done it up.
Where did the dollhouse come from?
Apparently the dollhouse was made in the 1960s by someone called Barbara, or so the guy I bought it from told me. Before the guy I bought it off had it, it was used as a prop in the Escape Rooms in Sheffield. That’s all I know about the history, but I know it’s got to be scratch-built as it’s so unusual.
What does ‘scratch-built’ mean?
Scratch-built simply means building something from scratch, usually with plans you’ve drawn up yourself. Unlike building a pre-cut kit, scratch-built dollhouses are made without a template or pre-cut pieces. They are true one-offs are are usually made by people with some woodworking skills and who have access to suitable tools.
How big is the dollhouse?
Well, it’s massive! It measures:
- 97cm long
- 81cm wide
- 45cm high (not including the castors!)
Had I known this before I bought it, I wouldn’t have bothered as it’s way to big for our house! But the size of it means that decorating it shouldn’t be as fiddly as at least there’s more room than a regular dollhouse.
I think the house is a large 1:12 scale, but being scratch built, it’s impossible to know for certain. Another downside of a house this big is that the rooms on the bottom floor are very dark and the large living room in particular feels a bit gloomy.
How I plan to renovate the giant dollhouse
My main mission with renovating the dollhouse is to not spend any money on it! I have a tonne of supplies I’ve used for previous projects, as well as materials donated by my father-in-law, so I’m confident I can renovate this dollhouse at a minimum cost. I did consider selling it as it was but the house is very dated and it didn’t seem right to sell it on with out renovating it, plus it’s going to be fun to do!
I plan to strip the majority of the wallpaper off (most of it is falling off anyway!) and update the walls with fresh paint. I also have a couple of rolls of dollhouse wallpaper I picked up at an antiques shop so I might do some feature walls too.
I’ve already painted one of the rooms blue as the wallpaper was in good shape and still attached to the wall. You can find out more about painting over dollhouse wallpaper in this blog.
The ceilings on the bottom floor are covered in textured paper with brown stain marks on them so that’s got to go and I plan to paint the ceilings white to help open up the downstairs rooms.
As for the floors, I have a tonne of lollypop sticks so I’m planning a DIY parquet floor in the main living room and then white-washing this to keep the room as bright as possible.
I have some drawer liner, a placemat, and a table runner which should work as flooring options too. You can see how I’ve used these previously in this blog post. Luckily the majority of rooms don’t have a floor covering, so at least I won’t have to remove any carpet!
I’m still uncertain as to what to do with the outside of the house. I quite like the current brick paper but it’s damaged in a lot of places and just painting the outside white may be the best way to update it.
So there you go, keep checking back for updates and you can see a video tour of the dollhouse below!