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Pullip’s House – Today’s Progress

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Today we attached the box base underneath of which we sured up with some braces and put in the mounts for the swivel wheels. As you can also see from the pic we have the room dividers in place. The kitchen and living room will be downstairs, the middle floor will have a bedroom and a bathroom and the upper floor will house another bedroom and a small study. Right now we have the parts cut for the roof, including the dormer that will go over the small attic study, but we are going to wait and assemble and attach that last.

At this point I have a lot of sanding and smoothing to do, so tomorrow I shall be out there with the hand sander, file and wood putty sealing up gaps and smoothing out dents. Once I get everything finished the way I want it, then I really must paint this Saturday since it will be getting up to 67 degrees, which will really help my paint to dry faster. After I get the base coats down then I can focus on cutting out my window trims, windows, window boxes and etc…

I may not have much by way of photographically noticeable progress tomorrow, so I may not make a dollhouse progress post, we’ll see though. Well that’s it for now!

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Pullip’s House – Framing the Windows and Doors

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Today I started framing the windows and doors that we cut out yesterday. I’ve begun by taking some 1/16th thick basswood that is 1/2 inch wide as my windows are, and using it make the casing. I had been considering using popsicle sticks, but the longest popsicle stick I could find at the craft store wouldn’t fit the lengths of most of my windows. Anyway you can see a progress pic up above. Since this is very small wood I used a crafter’s saw that is basically like a big X-Acto blade with a serrated edge to cut the pieces to size. I made sure that all pieces were cut to size and had a snug fit before I glued them into place. I think it is worth the extra effort to do this to your windows since it makes a nice clean straight edge, hides any errors you made, and also looks more authentic.

Continue reading more tips about framing windows

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Pullip House Progress – Mini Window Cutting Tut

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As you can see, we got all of the windows and the door cut out today! It’s finally starting to look less like shelves and more like a little house at this point. 🙂 As it were, it was quite easy to cut out the windows and doors after assembly, but before putting on the roof and base box. You could just turn the dollhouse to which side you wanted to work on and use the saber saw to cut out the window and door holes without need for setting up saw horses or anything. However I would recommend cutting out your door before assembly since the door comes flush to the floor and it can be tricky business to cut it out after being nailed and glued.

I’ve prepared a brief little tutorial on how we cut out the windows and doorway for anyone who is a beginner like me and needs some ideas. 🙂 So read on after the cut for the tutorial

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Pullip Dollhouse Project!

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I had been wanting to build a dollhouse for my Pullip for some time, and I finally decided now was the time to jump in and start building. I’m looking forward to being able to buy cute re-ment to outfit the house, and also I shall be getting a new doll for Xmas, so now I will have a big house for my dollies to live in. It’s so exciting!

So, first things first, I had to come up with a plan. I really liked a Pottery Barn Kids dollhouse bookcase that was functional, yet also a playscale dollhouse, so I decided to use it as a base for my plans. I planned out everything on graph paper first so all of the measurements would easily transfer to the wood. Then you may also notice in the picture, I plotted out cutting plans on the size plywood I was intending to buy so not only could I get the most out of my wood, but also determine how much I would need to buy. In this case one full sheet and one half sheet was enough to get me started with all of the base construction.

During the planning stage I also used my doll quite a lot to determine the proper height for windows and also the sizes needed for windows and doors. By making to scale paper templates of your window frames and such you can get a cheap and visual idea for how things are going to pan out without spending money, or worse, making mistakes on your precious wood!

Now, I thought I would share some measurements with you, but these can really be variable determining the size of room you would like to have, but after measuring my Pullip and checking up on Taeyang’s height, I decided that I would make each floor 15 inches high, the attic room being the only exception. This will leave about 2 inches of space above Pullip’s head, and about 1 inch above Taeyang’s head. Now you may think to yourself, “well those are some low ceilings” and well, you are correct, but because I don’t want this project to get too tall or unwieldy, I decided I would compromise. Sure it would be fab to have tall ceilings, but I just don’t have the space! However to make things fun I will have the attic room which will have a high vaulted ceiling and I intend to put a dormer on one side of the roof which will add more space and also some interesting architecture. So, if you can’t have it all, at least you can have some of it. 😀

Getting back to the measurements though, I also decided to make the depth of the house 15 inches. This will allow you to put a Pullip sized bed vertically in any room and have it fit. Again, it is tight, but you should consider the space you have. Finally the last basic measurement for the house is that it is 3 feet wide. 3 feet allows for ample space for rooms. I prefer larger rooms, so I plan to only have two rooms per level and I will offset them so one room is larger than the other. For example my bathroom on the second level does not need to be very big, so by making it a 13 x 15 room, I can have a bedroom then on the same level that is almost 2 feet wide! Anyway I’ll be sure to post more measurements for windows and such the further I get into the house construction.
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