With DEADvent finished and 2025 started, it's about time to begin spilling the beans on a big project! It's been so hard teasing pieces I've made without context, but it just wasn't right to start publishing until I was done with my 2024 business! If you've seen lots of interesting little things posted to my Instagram story and wondered, here's your context. And oh boy.
During 2024, I was presented with the opportunity to take in an old dollhouse from an adult step-relative which had been long outgrown, and finally ended up taking it in during September.
I've never had a proper dollhouse, though I always saw the appeal and had a few LEGO sets in the dollhouse genre. Now with my photo hobby, I thought the house could be a tremendous asset and an exciting project.
This project had to be split into parts, but it's not with any order or cohesion that the parts will be divided (e.g., a post for exterior work, one for interior work, one for furniture, one for props, one for mini dolls), because I didn't cleanly work on any one task in its own chunk of time. This is going to be a linear chronological-process document of my very nonlinear process, so it'll split wherever it works to do so.
The House
The house itself was an assembly kit in the 1:12-scale (basically, for dolls half the size of a fashion doll), and it falls in the same design genre and scale as the Greenleaf dollhouse company, though this model does not come from them. Despite the dollhouse being over ten, perhaps even over fifteen years old, the house is sold today by Hobby Lobby, as the "Vermont Farmhouse Jr. Dollhouse", but no brand information was provided on the online listing, so I didn't know who produced it. Whoever made it back in the childhood of the person I got it from still makes it, clearly. It's possible this copy came from a Hobby Lobby back when it was purchased. While this didn't appear to be Greenleaf, dollhouse designs being produced for many many years seems to be true for the Greenleaf company, too.
This house had no furniture inside as I got it except an affixed fireplace installation and "stone" mat which were glued to the second-floor dividing wall and floor base. These would have been extraneous additions. More stone mats were applied to the first floor interior and carpets were applied to the second floor and the third floor or attic area--two different carpets for the second-floor rooms, one for the third floor. Stairs connect the first and second floor, but there is no depicted access to the third floor and no banister rail at the top of the stairs to transition better into the second floor. The house as made up is divided into six rooms, with the first floor having the entrance/presumed living room, the side area (prime for a kitchen and table), the second floor being framed as an upstairs social area or den with the fireplace, a side room, and the third floor looking like a child's bedroom/nursery with the walls. There are no designated hall areas connecting the rooms (it's just all the rooms alone) and no doors inside, and the third floor has no depicted access method for the dolls who would live here.
Wallpaper is used extensively, though some decorations look like decals or an ironed-on layer, with the third floor being mostly that.
The appeal of this house and others in the "Greenleaf style" is that it offers an entirely finished front exterior with a door, and the interior stairs have space in front of them on the floor to let dolls to walk to them while still "in bounds". Many dollhouses for children have doorways on the thin side walls or no doors or exterior design at all, and stairs often come to the very edge of the floor, meaning you have to bounce a doll through the fourth wall to walk them onto the bottom step. Most kids don't mind and use the houses for play, not display, so that can pass. This dollhouse and others like it feel more like a realistic cross-section of a house, almost like a tiny studio film-set construction with logical layouts. You just don't get an explanation for the third floor access on this one, and the lack of liminal areas to segue into rooms and the lack of interior doors are odd.
There were immediate problems with this house. For one, it's old and a bit beat-up and gross from disuse. We won't talk about the insect husks that had to be vacuumed out of the house before I could even load it into my car to take home. Once home, the dirty carpets had to go first, and I ripped them out and tried to scrape as much of the remaining papery adhesive backing off the floor as I could. All of the underlying flooring is textured with a lined wood-plank design going horizontally. I stopped at the carpet removal in September because I had Living Dead Dolloween 2024 as a significant priority to work on first. The dollhouse featured as a scenery and photo-art prop in a few posts while I pondered what to do with it.
I had been thinking of leveraging this dollhouse for scenery to shoot my Christmas Carol LDD Minis story with, which ultimately came to pass after I worked on it further, so you've seen some glimpses of what I did if you've read the holiday Minis review post. I had debated whether the dollhouse's style wasn't workable for the atmosphere of A Christmas Carol, and ogled some other dollhouse options that would feel right...but who said an LDD take on the story had to be Victorian English...and there was no justifying the ownership of two large dollhouses at the moment.
In November, I continued working on what I could, aiming to strip the house down to basics if possible. I didn't like most of the wall decoration and tried to take that off, but a lot of adhesive backing was left behind and without the ability to disassemble the whole house, the walls wouldn't be scraped clean. I later sanded the edges of the wallpaper backing down to allow myself to paint over the excess without the edge of the original papering being visible. I managed to safely remove the stairs and the dividing wall with the fireplace on it, though I gave up on trying to detach the fireplace because it felt likely to break before it removed. The attachment felt that strong. I took out the stone mat in the entrance room since I didn't think it made any sense there, but the house wasn't promising a clean base. It was really looking like there was nothing I could do to de-make the house without destroying the structure and splintering the wood, and I was wondering if this was a loss. At this rate, getting an untouched kit of the same house from Hobby Lobby would garner better results...but even though I'm not principled enough to boycott Hobby Lobby, I am principled enough to not buy an expensive kit from Hobby Lobby when there is a dollhouse standing right in my basement. I wasn't even married to this specific dollhouse model anyway; why would I replace it with the same thing? But I'm very stubborn when the prospect of giving up arises in a challenge. There had to be a use for the house I had.
One of my initial ideas for the project before even taking the thing in was to turn the place into a house for the Lotties. My pairing of sweet childlike Lottie from the Arklu doll brand and the Living Dead Dolls Mini Lottie forming a sweet, shocking found-family duo was fun, and I didn't want to see the end of their story...but this wasn't going to pan out. Arklu Lottie is scaled as a tall adult in this dollhouse, with her head coming to the top of the doorjambs and her not being able to walk up the stairs without (hypothetically) crawling on her hands and knees. I'm not seeing my Arklu Lottie as an adult even if I portrayed her as oddly mature and totally independent before. She's a doll of a child and that's how I view her. LDD Minis are slightly undersized for the dollhouse, especially regarding the doorways, but they make much more sense in the house alone as the sole inhabitants--they're just right for 1:12 furniture and they're the perfect height to look out the attic window. I don't have any five or six-inch dolls I would consider to be more compelling owners for the dollhouse, so LDD Minis it is. That solves both problems of Arklu Lottie not suiting the scale and the house not being possible to strip down and make over into a clean and friendly house. We're leaning into the disrepair and necessary mess here. I'm giving this house to LDD Minis Sadie.
This "day out" costume emulating Return Sadie's extra pieces is Mini Lottie's coat dyed black and some Mego sunglasses. |
And thank goodness for that, because this finally gave me a coherent sense of artistic direction to work on. So welcome to LDD Cribs: Sadie Edition!
Note that this project started for real in November and I didn't even have Minis Sadie until December 21st, but Minis Lottie (RIP; replacing her someday) stood in to test things with a doll until I was able to get Sadie in. I got a lot done before Sadie could come in to oversee things and help me out, but it's all to her taste.
Starting
Concept chosen, my process jumped around a lot to keep me making progress without draining my energy by remaining on one tedious task for too long, so this is not an ordered process in any sense but chronological. Nevertheless, the first big thing the Sadie's-house concept provided in terms of artistic direction was a color scheme for the façade. I would have been changing the colors regardless of what the house became because the blue and purple were frankly awful, but I had been thinking of maybe painting the house brown for a slightly drab/dark seventies suburban look that would suit future Halloween photoshoots. Now, with the occupant defined as Sadie, it was an easy choice-black siding and roof, existing white trim maintained, and purple replaced with grey in most spots, plus an LDD-pink door. I thought that was more fun and interesting than a drab dusty muted generic creepy house. Barbie's Dream House looks like her vibe; why shouldn't Sadie's Nightmare House look like her?
The siding was the easiest to paint, while the shutters and white accents got a lot of errant paint to be touched up later. I relaxed my standards for perfect opaque color-blocking just a bit, given the nature of this house, since I wanted to keep productive and happy and not lose my mind. I broke some shingles and pieces of wood and scraped some paint off to ding the house a bit, which I'm sure would deeply confuse the dollhouse itself. Here I am repairing and covering up some damage...and then I'm adding some for aesthetic?
The most daunting task was the door, which had the thin sides to worry about as well as both wide sides, all while it had to remain in its place in the house. I was able to break off the doorknobs to re-glue, however, making them no obstruction. I actually later found a minuscule metal key wedged in the floor edge of the entrance hall which was designed to pair with the doorknobs!
There's obviously no mechanism, but the tiny key does fit in the hole...and would have been ideal as the key I staged in Vincent Vaude's mouth during his photo session!
I resorted to a Playmobil key cut out of a static keyring accessory sculpt at the time. |
Inside, I assigned the side room on the second floor to be Sadie's bedroom, and decided its walls would be LDD-pink and the floorboards black. I didn't decide yet on the fireplace room to the left. Downstairs in the entrance room, I painted over the wallpaper accents to tint them red, then painted the upper half of the walls above black, but was fine to leave the stairs white. I wasn't sure if I wanted to put on fragments of the stone mat again to make for a ruined floor design, or if the material was still inappropriate for an entrance room. I was feeling like it just didn't work over wooden floorboards, for sure, and I couldn't do anything about that base flooring texture, so I used the bare floor but painted it a dustier, darker dry grey blend. The ceiling could stay white to match the stairs, and I later enlisted the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come to get his feet red and make a footprint trail across the floor, up the wall, and across the ceiling through to the next floor. This technique did not work very well because hard plastic is not a good stamp, but I still like it. (I used Yet to Come because his body is cast black and was unlikely to pick up residual paint coloring after washing him off.) The wall paint work in the entry room was not perfect and couldn't have been, of course, so I relied on the "mess it up" strategy of haunted house design to disguise the flaws, creating tears and using black drips in places to make up for the absence of a clean line between wall and wallpaper. I then added the finials from the staircase I bought for the last pictures of Lottie's review to the staircase in the house to make it a bit fancier.
This piece arrived with the vertical bars misaligned and falling out, so no qualms about harvesting from it. |
On the bottom, the finial glued to the side of the staircase, while on the top it had to be placed onto the landing in the equivalent spot after painting. I wasn't able to use the full other staircase with the size of the gap between floors.
I spent the good portion of an hour, if not more, doggedly working on cutting an access hatch for the attic. I was deeply reminded of old-cartoon gags (where someone saws through the floor in a circle around a character standing there) when I got a blade through the floor and sawed upward down the line.
Looking into the attic from the open back, I cut the hatch in the recess on the right, above Sadie's bedroom. This was a nightmare. I don't have motorized woodworking tools, and the place I put the hatch was right under a slanted roof that impeded a great deal of motion, but I finally, inelegantly, stubbornly, miserably, cut the "rectangle" (I tried!) by hand with the tools I had and popped it out, then sanding it to make sure it would be able to swing down out of the hole on a hinge.
I could have put the blank wooden stairs through this hatch, but it would remove a lot of real estate in Sadie's room, wouldn't make sense there, and I'd need to cut the gap even wider to give room to not bump one's head walking up the stairs. We're doing a rope ladder.
The hinge for the hatch would be on the ceiling of Sadie's room so it could fall out like a trapdoor, and a rope ladder attached to the panel could fall down into the room. I thought I'd add a sliding pin-and-tube latch to keep the panel up in the ceiling, but I didn't want to have to push it down when the latch was released--it needed to fall on its own.
I re-repainted the attic a darker shade than my first go, and covered more of it up, which included the panel I cut out for the hatch. I added a demonic summoning circle in red paint, done by tracing a paint-jar cap first.
The center has a pentacle, with symbols of the alchemical sulfur sign, two X designs like many LDD scars, an LDD eye, and spooky numbers 13 and 4 filling in the gaps. I decided not to have the ritual circle in the recessed portion of the attic center closer to the window. I wanted to make sure I had the space and light to paint it right. I wasn't repeating my folly with the hatch cut under the ceiling slant.
I was then getting fed up with the fireplace being upstairs because I felt like it forced me to create two living rooms or a living room and a den, and so I tried again and finally broke the fireplace off the wall and relocated it downstairs where it made better sense to me, putting it on the foreground side of the dividing wall. This house isn't big or grand enough for an upstairs fireplace; it feels fairly suburban to me, and every house I've lived in had the one fireplace downstairs. I had lost and probably accidentally thrown out the original fireplace stone mat, so I selected another mat fragment to put underneath it. I later painted the mat darker to make it stand out from the repainted floor which was basically the same color.
Here's all of that interior work so far. I used the dollhouse itself as supply storage often to clear my floor space between work sessions, so ignore the palette on the second floor and the matryoshka in the attic. The latter was enlisted as a secure box to make sure I didn't lose the tiny doorknobs and key.
I then decided to shift the second-floor dividing wall one window over. Sadie's bedroom was important enough to be a larger room, and I liked the way the floors looked in cross-section with the staggered mirrored room sizes. It wasn't as satisfying to me seeing the rooms being aligned on both floors. While I had considered keeping the wall where it was, I didn't know what to do with the room on the left if it was so large. A library? But that could be incorporated into the living room. Every house I've lived in, and most houses I've ever been aware of, have had the second-floor stairs going onto a landing and hallway rather than directly into a room, and I decided that would work better for Sadie's house, to keep that space by the stairs as a landing hall that leads to her bedroom. I painted over the floor that now belonged to Sadie's bedroom as a result, but was still waiting on getting the pink paint I needed for the walls.
I could have also flipped the wall to the other side so the doorway to Sadie's room was on the further end, but the downstairs wall has the door on the far end, so it works to keep it on the close end upstairs.
Because a bathroom is an important part of a house and a common location for horror, I really didn't want to leave one out and tried to find any place one could go. The best answer was against the fourth wall in the second-floor landing area, in front of the stairs. It made the most sense and obstructed the least important scenery, and added more purpose to the hallway space if it led to two rooms. For a child's dollhouse, walls blocking off space are not advised, but if I was able to make the bathroom walls slide in and out of the space to grant me access behind, I would. I sized some panels of foam board to get an idea of the walls I would need to add.
These are not the walls I used, and are not properly sized, but I wanted to get a basic visual. The back wall would meet the lower edge of the floor cutout the stairs go through, and there would need to be suitable hall space to walk through. I also needed to procure two internal doors for Sadie's room and the bathroom if I was to make this happen.
To make the bathroom walls easier to place properly, and to make the space more realistic, I used more pieces of that wooden staircase to create a banister and transition between floors more elegantly. The back wall of the bathroom should be able to butt up against the end of the banister as an aid to aligning the wall module.
I didn't secure this until the walls were painted, though. I ultimately had to re-glue the banister on multiple later occasions because the rods are not all even and touching the floor and the attachment was delicate.
In the hallway behind the bathroom space, I painted the walls and ceiling (including the half of the dividing wall) an ochre color, overpainting the lines that would divide into the bathroom and Sadie's room because I knew I could paint over those sections once the walls were re-fitted and get a clean divide.
I also painted the kitchen area with gross green and black tones to cover the lower halves of the wall that had wallpaper originally and make the place look sick and moldy. I kept the top of the walls untouched except for a few splats and drips because the white color and grape designs were good to keep. The purple/green pairing by keeping the grapes was especially welcome.
It's abrupt, but when poring through the mega-document this started with, I've decided this is a reasonable place to end post 1. Continued shortly! This project is not currently finished, so don't expect this all to be wrapped up in January. I just figured I've done enough to share and start the topic by now!
I love dollhouses and miniatures so much! Good luck with the ambitious reno!
ReplyDeleteThank you! It's been coming along!
Delete"sadie's nightmare house" is such a great concept
ReplyDeletei always had a soft spot for dollhouses/dioramas, sadly i don't have the space to keep anything larger than 1:18 lol. excited to see where this project goes!