Making a Dollhouse (Part 1)

This past Christmas Chad gave me a kit to make a dollhouse.  I've been wanting to make one for a long time (I even started one a few years ago, but learned the hard way that you should probably not start by building the largest and most complicated house you can find).  One Christmas, when I was about 6 or 7 years old, my grandma built and decorated a dollhouse for me.  The inside was made to look like her house at the time--she used pieces of the carpeting in her living room for the dollhouse living room, a piece of her kitchen tile for the house kitchen, etc.  The house was beautiful--it was a three-story blue Colonial with and a big white front porch and black roof.  Coincidentally, the house I live in now matches the blue of the dollhouse exactly and has a big white front porch and black roof.  Maybe I was trying to replicate the dollhouse in real life?  Anyhow, I still have that house stored safely in my parents' attic.  I plan to give it to Charlotte when she's older and I'd be lying if I said I didn't want it back so I can play with it again, too.

After I got that dollhouse I always wanted to make my own.  One time I built a Barbie "dream house" out of my dad's old shoeboxes.  I took the lids off, stood the boxes upright, and stapled them together--three across for the first floor, two on the second floor, and an attic. It turns out that a men's size 12 shoe box is the perfect height for Barbie.  Even Ken had enough space to stand out without hitting his head on the ceiling.  Fast forward to present day.  I have a kit from Greenleaf Dollhouses to make "The Storybook Cottage."  It's one of the smaller and simpler designs available (you can buy kits to make huge Victorian mansions with 10 rooms, multiple staircases, and tons of intricate details).  This little cottage has just 2 rooms--no stairs and nothing too fancy or complicated.  It's a good practice piece and will give me an idea if I ever want to attempt something more challenging.

The schematics--page 1 of many.  And this is the "easy" house.

My dining room table taken over by parts sheets

Front right wall

Stain for the floors--this is a good one and odor free!

If I had the time and patience to use wood glue instead of hot glue I would have.  I know it would give a much cleaner look but it also requires way more patience than I have--all that clamping, taping, and waiting.  No thanks.  If I end up really liking how this one turns out and decide to make another, I can see testing out the wood glue route.  But for now, for just a simple practice house that Charlotte will probably play with in a couple years, hot glue works just fine.

It doesn't seem like I should have too much more building to do, but yet I have what looks like 400,000 more parts left.  There's also close to 1 million roof shingles, which I'm not terribly excited about.  Once  the rest of the building, gluing, etc. is finished it will be time for the fun part: decorating!  I'm planning on bright colors, inside and out.  The house came with a small furniture kit, too, which I'll probably take outside and spray paint this week.  If I really wanted to go all out the possibilities are endless.  You can actually get mini planks to make hardwood floors, special small scale wallpaper, and even kits to wire the house with electricity.  I think if I ever did that I would need to lock the house in a protective glass case so it would never get damaged, ever.  I'll stick with simple and not so precious that it can't take a little wear and tear!


I hope you had a good weekend, and Happy Monday (ugh, Mondays).  Have a great week!


~Stacy

Simplicity

I've posted on here before about how much Charlotte loves swings.  She slept in a swing for the first several months of life, so maybe that explains her immediate joy whenever a swing is in sight.  We've taken her to just about every park and playground within a 20 mile radius that has swings and she's loved them all.  Several weeks ago we inherited a swingset from our neighbor who is moving and did not want to move his daughter's old swingset with him.  He was nice enough to pass it on to us and a few days ago Chad went out and bought a bucket swing for Charlotte.  Judging by the following pictures, it was a wise investment.

Can you remember the last time you were this unabashedly happy about something?  At many times life is stressful, worrisome, and a slew of other negative adjectives that we adults are really good at dwelling on.  But sometimes it's incredibly simple and sweet.  This post is for my dearest friend Hilary. I know she can use a smile today and I hope this helps.  

I hope your weekend makes you smile like you're on a swing.  :)

~Stacy

Baby Birds (Couldn't Resist)

I was swimming at my parents today and heard lots and lots of loud little chirps.  They were coming from inside an RV.

My dad has an RV birdhouse hanging from his shed and every summer a new bird family is born.  It's a pretty nice place to grow up (for a few weeks anyway) because they seem to be safe from any of the other birds that eat them (I'm looking at you, Bluejay).  Today the little ones were waiting, rather impatiently, for mama to hurry home with lunch:

Cute.

~Stacy

Officially Summer!

As of today, it is officially summer.  I always thought it was weird how summer doesn't technically start until the third week of June even though it feels like mid-May is the start.  It doesn't help that July usually marks the time when stores start getting fall items in and you see ads everywhere for "Back-to-School."  I worked at a shoe store in high school and it was always so depressing when, 3 weeks after my summer break started, I had to start putting up back-to-school signage and seeing nothing but fall merchandise.  Even though my summer break wasn't even half over, it always seemed to speed up rapidly at that point.

Aside from stores, the scenes and scents of summer are everywhere.  My hydrangeas bloomed late last week, there's color everywhere, crowds of people are at the beach, kids are outside running through sprinklers and the smell of food on the grill is strong enough to overpower the leftover scent of the 9,400 moth balls I used under the porch to deter the groundhogs.  Ahhh.  One thing that always makes me happy and evokes thoughts of summer is the smell of sunscreen.  I never buy unscented sunscreen--the smell is just too good.  Sometimes I'll even put a little on in the winter, when it's cold and gray and depressing, and it never fails to pick up my mood.  I can't help but think of swimming, or reading in the sun on a big beach towel, or eating ice cream outside on a hot day.

I love those hydrangeas.  The purple ones didn't show up until we had lived here several years; the first year I noticed them I think there were just 2 or 3 flowers.  It gets bigger every year and now there are dozens.  The white hydrangeas and the front porch are what sealed the deal for me on this house.  Those two bushes are enormous and they get bigger every year.  The flowers are the size of dinner plates.  Last year it got too big for it's own good and became weighted down so much that the flowers rested on the ground.  It also had some dead parts leftover from previous seasons stuck inside and eventually the middle parts of the plants looked pretty bad and the sides couldn't support it anymore.   I read up on how and when to prune that type of bush and ending up cutting it down to about 8" from the ground.  I felt like I had just murdered it and thought there was no way it could come back from that, especially since this was in March and it had just 3 months to get its act together.  Thankfully it worked out and now looks better than it has in years.

Over the weekend a certain someone graduated to big pool.  My parents have a pool and last weekend it was open for business:

What a life :)

Enjoy the longest day of the year today!

~Stacy

Anniversary Weekend

We just wrapped up this wonderful anniversary/Father's Day weekend by picking our baby girl up from her stay at my parents and sharing a mint chocolate chip cupcake before we put her to bed.  That's my kind of Sunday :)  As for the rest of the weekend, it was so nice and relaxing.  After Chad and I dropped Charlotte off yesterday morning, we drove along the Lake Erie coastline for about 45 minutes until we came to Vermilion (a small town near Sandusky and not too far from Toledo).  They were having some sort of outdoor festival in town, plus there were a bunch of cute little shops and restaurants to walk to.

We ate lunch there and walked around, then came home and had a Revenge marathon.  Have you seen that show?  We wrote it off at the start of the season as completely ridiculous and unwatchable, bound to be cancelled after 3 episodes.  We determined all of this from the previews, having never actually seen the show.  We ended up leaving the TV on after another show, which happened to be the season finale.  We kept sneaking glances and eventually were glued to the screen until the very end, having no idea who any of the characters were or any of the back story.  It was some seriously good television.  We subscribed to Hulu to watch the season from the beginning and just finished the last 2 episodes today.  We will definitely be watching Season 2 when it starts back up this fall and if you've had the same opinion about Revenge please reconsider.  The acting is amazing (Madeleine Stowe can practically turn people to ice with her eyes), the story lines are a perfect mix of drama, suspense and humor, and there's always a crazy plot twist.  I haven't been this hooked on a new show since Lost.  

Okay, enough about Revenge.  We had dinner at B Spot, Michael Symon's burger place right down the street from us that is delicious.  They take burgers seriously and we got lucky enough that we didn't even need to wait for a table.  After that we got coffee and walked around for awhile, just enjoying being out, together, past 6PM.  I haven't stayed up that late in a long time (or slept in so long on a Sunday).  It was an A+ weekend and fabulous anniversary.

I hope you had a pleasant weekend, and Happy Father's Day!

~Stacy

Happy Anniversary

We met as kids, just 14 and 15.  We've been together since we were 16 and 17.  In many ways we've grown up together.  Evidently, we like the month of June: we started dating, became engaged, got married, closed on our first house, and had our first child all in the month of June.  This Sunday will mark our 7th wedding anniversary and 11 years together.  I don't know how that happened, how we went from being kids who just learned to drive and went to dances together to a family of our own.  I didn't know much when I was 16 (besides everything, because what 16 year old doesn't??) , but I knew I'd marry that boy.  Glad I was right :)

Happy Anniversary (and Happy (2nd) Father's Day!) to the cute boy in my 10th grade World History class.  I may not remember much of the history part of that class, but I'll never forget the rest!

~Stacy