Dolls House Build

[Ozkaban]

Hi,

Here’s the promised build for the Dolls house I did for my daughter for her birthday. Stage 1 is complete, but to be built is a front for the house with opening shutters and repainting the inside of the opening roof (original colour scheme was a bad idea executed poorly…). The idea of the house was to build something that was ‘play’ standard (as opposed to a model house), with a few nice touches, like the shingle roof.

It’s a 1:12 scale house (roughly). The floors are 22cm in height (about 2.65m, or 8’ 6” in scale). Width is 700mm , depth is 230mm (that was a mistake – should have been 350 or so). Overall height is about 900mm. Sketchup model of Dollhouse attached.

It’s made out of 9mm and 6mm MDF sheets. Probably should have used ply, but mdf suits the purpose well enough. Uprights, roof and base are 9mm, with 6mm floors. Joined with basic dado routed using a Triton 1400W and a Pro Grip ruler. It’s held together with titebond and a few pins.

Photo 1
After reading Wongos thread on his doll house, I thought that the idea of adding storage space underneath was a good idea. I’ve put in some drawers made out of 12mm pine, joined with a drawer lock bit and a false front on them with some knobs I found a Babies Galore (I think). All of the furniture can fit in them when not in use, so bits that don’t fit in with the days play don’t get spread every where.

The other thing I wanted to do was to make the stairs go somewhere – more my requirement that my daughters… In the end, they took up a lot of space and made some rooms really quite cramped, so I’m not sure it was a good idea. Maybe making the floors 350mm deep would have solved that.

Photo 2 & 3
Another idea of Wongos that I used was the use of Model Ship building timber for the floor boards, finished with a couple of coats of polyU. The stuff is .6mm think, and costs about $20 for the amount I used. The first one I did with just brushing on titebond glue, which didn’t work well to be honest – some boards lifted and buckled, which was a real PITA. A carpenter mate suggested watering down regular PVA with about 10-15% water and trying that – it worked much better for the second floor.

Photo 4 & 5
Photos of my daughter helping me dust off after hand sanding the floor boards – she loves helping in any capacity and I quite enjoyed the interest she took in the project. She also helped nail the back on and was very excited at succeeding at nailing several nails all the way in. She wasn’t quite 4 at the time, so it was quite fun.

Photo 6
I used 12mm dowel uprights near the stair wells to support the floors. There will be walls installed to support the rest.

[Ozkaban]

Photo 7
The green area at the front is a garden area 60mm below the rest of the house, and about 130mm deep. It’s lower then the rest of the house as I wanted to have opening doors and if it was level *anything* left in the garden area when the doors were closed would result in them being ripped of the hinges. I also installed a post-and-rail fence which is in later photos.

The stairs were made out of two strips of 190x19mm pine. I routed 20mm stair treads using a V-Groove bit with a 1” cutter length on a table router. I laminated them together (at the thinnest point the pine was only 3-4 mm thick, so not that durable), and then cut them in half. Please ignore the optical illusion of the front of the stairs not meeting the floor properly. It had nothing to do with a !@#$% up on the router table….

Photo 8 & 9
The roof was by far the trickiest bit. As I chose an odd angle for the apex, I had no end of grief getting it right. At the time I built the dollhouse I had now power saw beyond a jigsaw, so I used that and a straight edge (the progrip ruler – very nifty bit of kit). I then drew lines on both sides based on the angle and used a wooden block plane to get the angle right. I reinforced the roof join (which is about 50mm down the back of the roof) with a couple of triangles glued and screwed in.

The Dormer gables were another reasonably tricky thing to build. I used the same strategy as for the roof angle – cut it out straight and then plane down to the angle required. Worked out OK in the end. The dormer windows are routed out leaving the cross in the middle, and 3mm Perspex is inlaid from behind. Trim was glued on inside and out to hide the edges.


As I was planning to use hand-cut WRC shingles for the roof, I searched the internet a bit of ideas. One guy, to whom I’m very grateful, suggested painting the roof brown ‘cos all of the gaps in the shingles (esp in the corners) don’t show. Great tip, and I highly recommend it.

The roof is hinged with a continuous hinge across the back, which is more than strong enough to hold the weight of the open roof.

Photo 10
Did I mention I was putting electric lights in? Don’t do it if you don’t need to!!! Anyway, I wanted to use a battery pack, not a power plug, and torch style lamps will drain the batteries too fast. They look nicer than LED’s, but they use something like 10 times the power. At my local hobby store they were offloading a bunch of old style light fittings with torch globes in them. I bought them all for about $2 each, and proceeded to retrofit LED’s into them. That wasn’t as fun as it sounds! I used a website (http://www.ledcalc.com) to work out the circuitry and ended up with a very simple solution. 2 banks of 3 1.2V rechargeable AA batteries in parallel (total 0f 3.6V, 5000-odd mAH), and every LED in parallel – this multiplies the current drain, but does not affect the voltage. Then it was a simple matter of finding some nice bright 3.5 nominal voltage LED’s, which is a standard voltage as it turns out. I think using normal 1.5V alkaline AA’s would generate 4.5v, which is outside the LED’s range and would pop them, so I’ve gotta stick with 1.2v rechargeables.

Photo 10 shows the channels routed for the main cables. I laid one positive and one negative cable and soldered the smaller lights off each, which maintained the parallel setup of the LED’s, and meant I could install them in the whole house. At the end of stage 1, only the upper floor has the lights – the attic and downstairs are still waiting on stage 2.

[Ozkaban]

Photo 11 & 12 – Finished (well, stage 1 anyway)!
Here are a couple of photos of my daughter playing with the finished product, which was her 4th birthday present. We organised it with relatives to each giver her 1 room of doll house furniture from a popular kids store, so that way she had a ton of kit that all matched.

The Pièce de résistance (to my mind anyway) is the shingle roof. I cut every single one of those 1,300 shingles by hand. Every single one…. I had a length of 90x19 WRC, which I chamfered 5mm off each side of one end, and then cut 40mm off the end. Chamfered again, cut again, repeat. This gave me the basic shape of the shingle. I made up a jig which is among the more vicious looking things I have made – a $2 shop meat cleaver with a bolt though the hole in it to a lump of 4x2 nailed down to a board. The bolt acted like a hinge. I would then slide the shingles under the blade and split them off, about 1-1.5mm at a time with a guillotine like action. I got about 60-odd shingles from the 90mm width. I didn’t sand or clean them up at all, and I haven’t put any finish on them – they look and feel good being left natural.

I glued them on by ruling a line across the roof (quite difficult with the dormers), running a line or two of glue across and then laying them down in batches. From the second batch, I left it flat to dry so any excess glue doesn’t run down the face of the shingles… Turns out drying them flat is easier than scraping glue off rough shingles with a chisel! It took about 1 hour for each side of each dormer, with about the same for each other section of the roof. All up, including the back of the roof, it took about a fortnight of gluing in front of the tele each night.

I also made opening shutters on the side of the house. One of the flaws of the design is that I could only put shutters above the staircase and in the bathroom. My daughter promptly moved the lounge into the bathroom so her dolls could hang out the window… Not sure how to fix this situation.

I used normal acrylic paints for the outside of the house, and the interior end walls. Everything else got craft paper glues on with wallpaper glue. It has held up well so far – I was worried it would look rubbish after a bit, but it doesn’t. The bathroom is painted in gloss white enamel.

Dowel Drilling Jig.jpg
You can also see the post and rail fence which was the first job I did in anger with my H&F SPD-25A. I drilled a 13mm hole down the centre of a short piece of 4x2. I cut away the top half of the each end to allow access to the dowel, and drilled two holes in the jig for each of the holed in the posts. I would then slide a piece of 12.7mm dowel into the jig, drill the top hole, cut the dowel off flush with the bottom of the jig, slide the next bit in and so on. When I’d finished the top holes, I realigned the drill and then drill the bottom holes. The only trick was to only partially drill the posts that were on the corners or the gate openings. The posts were mounted in 13mm holes drilled into the garden area, reinforced with 12mm timber glued and nailed underneath. I also drove a screw up into the bottom of each post to hold it securely in place. Post and rails finished with a couple of coats of interior estapol.

Cheers,
Dave

[munruben]

Excellent Dave, absolutely fantastic. That must be one very happy young lady with a dolls house like that.

[Helen Louis]

Hi Ozkaban,
just love the doll house to bits.I am planing on making one for my two girls 6yrs & 4 yrs. My mum made one for me when I was little and now I feel I must do the same.
I do not know much about timber and was wondering why you felt you
should have used ply instead of MDF?

[Ozkaban]

Hi Helen,

I think plywood is stronger over the spans I was using - I ended up having to put a post in to support the edge near the steps. Though to be honest, MDF is very easy to work, cuts well, routes well, takes a finish very well and comes in useful, uniform thicknesses, so it is fine for the purpose really.

From my build I learnt a couple of things - hinged internal doors get in the way (so I ended up leaving them out even though I built them), go deeper than 230mm (as mentioned, 350 is probably better). Also, don't try to hard to get things to scale - I did that with the steps and they ended up being too wide. A 150-200mm tall doll probably needs 60mm, not 90mm. Putting the steps at the edge of the house was also a mistake - not enough room for windows!

Enjoy making the dolls house - don't forget to post photos as you go!

Edit: Sorry, forgot my manners - Welcome to the forums! May your stay be long and enjoyable!

Cheers,
Dave