A very good friend of mine, Mariette, found an very old 2-room dollhouse when they moved out of their old house. She found it it the attic and it was not in a very good condition. On the following pictures, you can see how it looked when I got it and what I made out of it.

It has now a special place in Mariette's living room, where everybody can admire it.

This is what I got after she found it on the attic .......... not very nice looking. 2 rooms, 3 or more layers of wallpaper, and not even real dollhouse wallpaper, a few layers of color, paper flooring ............ puh, that meant a lot of work.

And it did take me more than 7 months to finish it. But I think the final result doesn't look bad at all :-)

I do have a lot of pictures at all stages of the work in progress, but I couldn't possibly add them all here. But if I can help you out if maybe you have a dollhouse that needs renovation work, just let me know.

Take another look at the previous picture ............ YES, it is the same house, only completely renovated with a "one room addition". It has become a two-story little house now. This pic gives you a nice view to the back of the house and the terrace with all the flowers I added.

As you can see, we have a cosy living room with a fireplace, a kitchen with a nice big corner window to allow lots of light to come in and a bedroom on the upper floor.

The living room really is a cosy place, don't you think? I made the fireplace entirely out of scratch, the red/white striped furniture was bought, the little table and plant holder are D.I.Y. items again. I just kept adding items until I could look at the place and think that I wanted to spend time there myself. I also made the flooring myself (Balsa wood).

The kitchen is small, but functional and cosy too. I added a kitchen rack (this one here was saved when I got rid of my Del Prado Houses), a porcelaine sink and a round table with 2 chairs. There is another item in the back which is a D.I.Y. self shelf with all kinds of items on it. If you want to see more details, take a look at the very last pic in this section. The items that you can see on this little shelf are made out of cut-outs.

There is a staircase (or let's call it a ladder) to access the bedroom above.

This room is the addition I decided to make, since the original model with just 2 pieces was a little too small after all. The curtains and bedding items had to be sewed and I'm really not very good at that. So I asked my dad, who used to be a tailor in his younger years, do to that for me.

There is a porcelaine bathroom sink, a little mirror and even a first-aid shelf.

The idea of finishing the exterior walls with clapboard siding came when I decided to make this little house a log cabin. And since the terrace was already, there I just need to make some renovations here too, like the flooring and the stairs, and then I started adding the details. It's an inviting place to sit and enjoy either a nice little bottle of wine or maybe even dinner, as long as the wheather allows that.

The kitchen had a corner window, but I had to remove it completely, as well as the 3 windows of the living room. But right from the beginning of this project, I liked that little corner window here. There is a lot of space to put little items in there.

Another item made completely out of scratch. The brick walls are made of the brick sheets availabe at every dollhouse store. Once the construction is finished, you just add these brick sheets and a few accessories and you're done. A few wood striped on the outside to complete the whole thing are needed of course to give it a nice finished look.

Since there is a ladder in the kitchen to access the upper floor, I decided to add this little baluster to keep the people from falling down. Fortunately, I always keep a little stock of different kind of spindles and railings.

Except for the bottles and grapes in the fruit basket, all the other items you see in this pic are made out of print-outs. It's fun and easy and less expensive.