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I have been working on building a roombox. A roombox, in case the term is unfamiliar, is like a dollhouse, but just one room, and sometimes the outside is not made to look like a house's exterior. In this particular case, I wanted a bakery storefront, but I didn't want to deal with a pointy roofed house that I have to find room for.

My reasons for wanting to make a bakery were that I have two roughly dollhouse sized ball joint dolls (a Pukipuki and a Little Gienie) and a pile of Rement miniature plastic food, especially cakes. The two dolls have been hanging out in the wizard's tower I built, but they are just housesitting there. It's not really their cup of tea (though they are rather fond of turning the dragon eggs on the hearth). Anyway.

It's 11x11x14, which makes it huge for a dollhouse room, but as both the Rement and the dolls are slightly overscale, I think it works out. I'm already thinking I shall have to make my own furniture for the display cases and such anyway.

First, my dad and my husband helped with cutting boards and nailing things together. Then I painted rather a lot of things white. That bendy board is the wainscoting. It warped, so I tried painting the other side, thinking that would warp it back. Instead it warped along the other edges. Naturally. Nothing a few heavy books and some creative swearing can't fix.



Then I put in flooring. This was all one sheet, from Houseworks. It's real wood, but perhaps 1/32 of an inch thick. So all the splinters you'd expect from real wood, but it's too thin to really do much with. After spilling paint on it in a few places, I elected to coat it with matte varnish (the sort they sell by the tole paints in craft stores). We'll see if that protects it.

Next was wallpaper, ridiculously cute in pink stripe and bakery chic... courtesy of your neighborhood craft store scrapbook section. Someday I'll do a grownup dollhouse with real dollhouse wallpaper (sounds like an oxymoron, doesn't it?). Not any time soon at those prices, though.



I removed part of the paper before I put it up so the wainscoting would have something besides paper to stick to. Pro Tip: gluesticks are inadequate for anything. I wound up spot-glueing parts of the wallpaper with watered down woodglue. Wrinkles and air pockets. Not the best result, but now I know better, at least.



Here's a mockup, before all the glueing, where I was picturing how everything would go together. I realize people don't keep cakes on bookshelves, but aren't they pretty?



And an overview of the roombox. The top and front are plexiglass, removable so I can get into it easily. I thought about doing some kind of fancy front, with cakes displayed in windows and an in-set door, but whenever I see them in other people's miniatures, they just... push all the interior details too far back. You can't really see inside with all that in the way. So instead, we're already standing inside when we look into this bakery.


More to do. More already done, actually, just needs to be photographed, uploaded, resized, and written about.
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Things are growing! We planted a ton of seeds in the ground, and the peas are already popping up.



it's spring! ... almost )

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