I've mentioned this project here once or twice these past few months and I think it's about time I share a bit more about it (+ some photos)! In late June I found a Lundby dollhouse in an ad on our equivalent to Craigslist. The seller was a tween girl who'd apparently spent all her birthday + Christmas money on it for years but had grown tired of it. Considering all the furniture that was included it was a very good deal, much too good to pass up, even though I had no idea where in our one bedroom apartment I would put it.
So, I brought it home. Finally, for the first time since I moved out of my parents' house twelve years ago, I had a dollhouse in my home again! Growing up I always had dollhouses. My mum made my first out of old cardboard boxes and we made furniture from things we found around the house. I was an expert at making miniature beds out of empty coffee boxes + fabric scraps by the age of six. The Sylvanian bear family mum bought me for that first house kept moving up the property ladder. They were especially lucky when we moved into town in the early 90s and our neighbours gave my sisters and I their grown girls' old Lundby house. For many years I dreamed of owning a fully furnished Lundby dollhouse. Whenever I visited toy stores I would stare longingly at all the miniature furniture.
It seemed like an unattainable dream, until I got to spend a summer working at the Micki toy factory, i.e. the Micki company that owns Lundby, in my late teens (by then everything Lundby was already produced abroad, though - my job was packing toy train sets for Ikea). I spent a large portion of my salary in the factory's outlet store and soon owned a Lundby dollhouse filled with all the latest furniture.
The house has stayed in my old room because I haven't had space for it yet. By now, over a decade later, it is quite dated though. My intention has been to renovate it in the future, when I have more space, but when I found that house in early June I decided to renovate that instead. It actually had the exact same front + wallpaper as my old house, but this one is a bit newer which means the walls are easy to take apart while the walls of my old house are glued together.
I would make a terrible DIY blogger because whenever I get excited about a project I forget all about taking photos of the process! I did snap a few photos before I replaced the old wallpaper and painted the front of the house, but I'd already started taking it apart + painting the roof at that point. As you can see it was in dire need of some TLC :)
It took me quite some time to pick out wallpaper... Not only did I have my digital scrapbooking paper stash to choose from but I also found images of real wallpaper online. The possibilities really seemed endless... My instinct was to choose various shades of grey for every room but since this is a dollhouse I forced myself to pick something more colourful for some of the rooms. As for the front colour I went back and forth between grey and mint green for the longest time but eventually settled on mint green. Here are the walls in progress:
By the time I assembled the house again I'd found the perfect space for it - the unused wall above my desk. I often think we have used up all the space in the apartment but somehow I can usually manage to squeeze in something more when I really want to. So, we put up a shelf and my new house had a home. The only downside is that this corner of the living room is very far from the windows on the other end of the room, so the quality of my photos will never be that great. But, I do want to share photos of it before I move into my light airy office in our yet-to-be-found future home, so this will have to do for now :)
(Perhaps you spotted my Project Life albums up there?) I still have many details I want to add to the house (and of course this will always be a work in progress) but I've come quite a long way so next week I will share more close-up photos of the rooms of the house!
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