One Door Installed, But...

After much discussion on the relative merits of cutting down the wooden doors my mother bought months ago, versus building new doors to the required size, based on the design of those doors, my father eventually - somewhat reluctantly - cut down the existing doors, removing the shorter, topmost sections and refitting them within a truncated frame.

Some of the cutting wasn't perfectly even, leaving a subtle gap in the frame on one side, but a touch of Polyfilla and coat of paint will cover that up well enough.

Just for fun, though, the front door - pictured above - has been fitted to the larger of the two rear panels of the dolls' house and, because the rooms are not consistently sized, these panels cannot be simply switched from front to back. In the photo, the panel is about 1.5" inset from the left hand side of the house in order to give the impression of where the front door would be, had it been fitted to the correct panel.

When last I checked, we still weren't entirely decided on what would be done about the 'true' front door, since the only ornate door frame we purchased is glued firmly in as the back door... but at least we can begin to see how good the finished house will look.

Also, that window above the door looks awesome, and demonstrates the height all the other window frames will be, once all the alterations are done. The remaining frames aren't going to be as detailed, since we needed eighteen in total(!) but all of them will have thin plastic sheeting glued on as the 'windows'.

Considering Doors

Not much of an update, but news all the same: in between domestic disasters of a slightly larger scale, my folks have been looking into doors for the dolls' house.

With some web-searching, they found Minimum World, 'The Online Dolls House Superstore', who had some kind of special offer on doors, so they ordered a set of 1:12 scale Streets Ahead "Collector's Item" wooden dolls' house doors.

The dolls' house wasn't built to any particular scale - and certainly isn't 1:12, as it turns out. Straight out of the packaging, the doors go right up to the ceiling on the ground floor (18.1cm/7.1" room height), and are about an inch too tall on the upper floor (16.1cm/6.3" room height) - but the more elaborate 'front door' could be made to work if cut down slightly. Such trimming would be tricky, but by no means impossible, due to the way the door is pinned into the frame.

Alternatively, now we've seen how they work, my father might end up making something at a more suitable size, and attaching them with miniature hinges. There was some discussion about the relative scale of hinges, with my father of the opinion that the smallest available hinges would be too large for the dolls' house, and me of the opinion that it's a dolls' house, and should be viewed as if through the eyes of a child, who wouldn't notice or care about such points of accuracy and authenticity as long as the doors open and close. I think this is one of those times we're going to agree to disagree until we have time to experiment...

Also, the question of interior doors was posed. Sure, having them would make the house even more realistic... but they'd be a bit of an extravagance and could actually have a negative impact on play, since a fairly large area of each room would need to be kept clear to allow the doors to swing, and an open door would obscure a good chunk of each room.

Whatever happens, the new doors (and windows) need to be larger than the tiny plastic things that were originally installed!