A Very Pink Playroom

I thought it would be fun to share some of the work we did on each room of our family dollhouse restoration project. It was my first experience working with miniatures (since I was a child playing in the dollhouse) and I thoroughly enjoyed the challenge of making as many pieces of furniture and accessories as I dared.

The playroom sits directly below the children's nursery and by special request of my nephew, we included a slide from the nursery into the playroom.

Now let's see how we did it.

Everything starts with a base. In our playroom, we needed to add a hole in the corner so the kids could slide down into the playroom, and a ladder so that they could get back up into the nursery.  My mother was responsible for all of the construction and lighting in the house. The posts in each corner were part of the original dollhouse construction support; the crown molding is the new structural support she added. The round-wire electrical was attached to the floors and covered with a sheet of wood flooring she found online somewhere.

I wanted a hot air balloon in the playroom so I made one out of paper mache. Since paper is flammable I didn't want to add a light inside the balloon and we chose to add a spotlight hidden behind the balloon. You can see that in the following picture.

For the walls, I made a wainscotting by using a base of Balsa and then cut an overlay design out of card stock and glued them together. Once they are painted white they look like a single carved piece of wood.

 

Take a closer look at the pictures hanging on the wainscot. I asked my daughter and my niece to paint me a picture. They did and I miniaturized them and hung them on the wall with a mini thumbtack.

Because this is a playroom, the furniture is minimal. We assembled a House of Miniatures armoir that my mom found years ago and added tin panels and then filled it with store-bought goodies. I took an old round jewelry box and covered it with a fun yellow fabric to use as an ottoman. The slide is an old piece a racecar track that we had lying around. And then, I made the desk and corbels and hung a chalkboard on the wall.

 

To make the rug, I used transfer paper to copy
a design from the Internet onto a sheet of felt.
I used this technique on the rugs throughout the house;
it gave me a chance to pick any pattern I wanted to
decorate my tiny home.

More to come in new posts.