How to paint a wooden dollhouse

I recently brought my daughter a dollhouse, and to save money decided as a hobby I would make the furniture to go in it.  I started with a Lundby Smaland but found the 1:16 scale a little hard to work with.  So I decided to upgrade to a larger 1:12 scale wooden doll house.

I brought my house from the Australian shop Adairs Kids, it started out looking pretty cute in pink and green, but I'm not really a pink kinda girl ....

I disassembled the house and laid it out flat, I gave all the walls a quick sand with an small electric handheld sander so that the new paint would stick.  I gave it an undercoat with some left over wall primer we had from (real) house renovations.  The final coats of paint should really be a gloss paint.  The main reasons for using a gloss on the top coat is that it is not 'chalky' to touch and will not mark as easily as a matt finish.  It is entirely up to you which paint you choose, but a gloss finish will be more durable for a toy dollhouse. I finished off the windows and roof with a test pot of black paint.

If you want to put up wall paper and change the flooring now is also a good time to look at doing this.  I found it easier to do walls and floors while it is flat, although this house shape is very simple and walls and floors and easily be altered once the house has been put back together.

I generally just tack wall paper to the house using blutak as a I change my mind.... a lot!  But any craft glue will be sufficient to get the paper to stick to the walls.  Cardstock or scrapbooking paper is the best type of paper to use on the walls as the glue will not transfer through and ruin the pattern on the outside.  For one of the main rooms I used a white brick patterned scrapbook paper from Australian store spotlight and the flooring is a roll of wood patterned adhesive I picked up from Bunnings.

How to make a miniature towel ladder

I started with a pair of chopsticks from the local sushi shop!

1.  Decide on the height of the ladder by measuring up the wall of the room it will be placed in.  Place another piece of furniture in the room, i.e. the bathtub or bathroom sink as a guide as to how high you want the ladder to sit on the wall.

2.  Cut the chopsticks to length.

3.  If there is enough chopstick left over you and use these pieces as the 'rungs' otherwise you can always use some spare dowel.

4.  Depending on the height of the ladder, this will determine how many rungs you can fit on.  I used 3 rungs as this helped with displaying the miniature towels.

5.  Use a good quality craft/balsa wood glue to glue the rungs to the uprights.

6.  Decorate with small pieces of fabric, I used calico.  If you pull a few strands from the bottom of the fabric it will give the effect of it being frayed like a towel.