Doll house Part 3: Dining room and Kitchen

It took me some time to pen down this post. I have discovered a new found love for paper quilling and was experimenting with that for the last few days. Until I realized that it’s been quite a few days since my last post on the doll house.

In this post I will discuss about the kitchen (and dining room).

Similar to the other rooms, my mother used handmade paper for the floor and gift wrapping paper for the walls. Kitchen windows rarely have curtains. So in order to make it look like a window again we used a picture from the desk calendar to make it look like a scene from outside the window. We covered that with a piece of transparent plastic so that it would look like glass.

Now, when I was originally planning this house I had intended that the dining table and chairs were in the living room which is pretty common in most of our houses. However, my niece had other ideas. Even though the living room was more spacious she decided that these belonged in the dining room. And she's the boss so we went with that. The other furniture here is the kitchen counter with sink, fridge and washing machine.

1.       Dining table and chairs:

For the table I used ice cream sticks, a piece of white paper and the top cover of a bottle of sunscreen lotion. Basically I stuck pieces of the ice cream stick together. I made two such rows and stuck them together. Originally I had planned to leave it like that so that it looks like a cool wooden table. But then once I was done with it, I felt it looked a bit messy and hence decided to cover it with a piece of paper. For the stand I just stuck the sunscreen bottle cover to the bottom of the table. Now ideally it would have been nice to have four legs but I just figured this would get me better stability considering a child was going to play with it. After I was done sticking I painted it all a shade of red and was done with the table.

The paint job for the table looks lousy I know. But to be honest I was going for a particular look. To give it a wood kind of finish so it looks more genuine.

For the chairs, I used cardboard for the frame and small squares of scotchbrite sponge wipes for the seat and covered these with red cloth. I should make a mention here that up until this time I only hada red cloth with me and this was why I used these for all the pillow and cushions so far. My mom sent me some swatches of cloth later on which I used for the bedroom furniture. 

So as you can see, the frame was pretty easy. All I had to do was cut and stick cardboard in the shape I desired and then stick the cushion to it. The not so easy part was making the legs of the chair.

Initially I cut and painted some small pieces of wooden sticks and stuck it to the chair. But as you can see that it doesn’t seem very stable. And although I was able to make it stand it wasn’t strong enough to last long. My mom felt it was fine but I wasn’t satisfied. So I went with using a similar structure as the dining table and used some caps of random fevicol bottles and perfume bottles which had similar shape and size which I painted and stuck to the bottom of the seat. And thus came up with the final chair. As you can see from earlier pictures I made four such chairs.

Its not my best piece of furniture but I still am pretty proud of it.

2. Fridge:

I had initially thought that this would be one of the easiest things I made. Because I had realized pretty early on that I could use the box that came with the paints to make the fridge. This way it would be an openable fridge. I had thought all I had to do was paint it.

I was actually working on the sink when I realized I had something with me which would make it look like the vegetable tray of the fridge. That was the spoon that you get with the detergent powder. I cut this spoon so that it was the desired shape and size and stuck it to the bottom of the fridge.

At the time my cousin was getting engaged and we had a lot of visitors who gave me some wonderful feedback about the furniture I had already made. One of my cousins said that you have to make shelves inside the fridge too and a freezer to make it more believable. So then I got around to doing just that. Of course these shelves and the freezer door are not extremely sturdy and are there just for the look. I used some pieces of cardboard for these.

For the outside now I decided to make a handle and a logo. For the handle I used remains of the detergent spoon. I used the part which had a curve and it was strong enough to actually pull and open the fridge door (I don’t know if it is still so two months later now). And for the logo I looked up online to see which was the easiest logo to draw. I drew this on a small thin piece of cardboard and stuck it to the top right corner of the fridge.

3. Kitchen counter and sink:

For this, I again used a box for a perfume as the main frame. 

Once I had decided on my box, I had to measure out the sink. Very early on in a discussion with my mom we had come up with the idea to use the spoon from the detergent we use at home for the sink since it was the perfect shape for us.

So I measured out the size of the spoon and cut out the box accordingly such that the spoon would correctly sit inside the box. Once this was done I wrapped the whole thing with white paper and then put the spoon inside of it.

Once this was done I could just paint the whole box in the desired colours. I painted the top portion of it black to make it look like the black granite that is on most kitchen counters in India.

I painted the bottom part of it a combination of yellow and green to make it look like cupboards.

To finish off the sink I painted it a shade of metallic black mixed with white (grey). However, looking at the picture now it seems to be a very dark grey. If I had to redo this, I would paint it with a more silver looking shade. For the tap I used some aluminium foil wrapped around a piece of coiled paper. I then curved this in the desired shape and stuck it to the sink.

4. Washing machine:

The credit to this goes to my mom (which is also the reason for me not having any pics of the making). She used an empty LED bulb box, cut a round hole in front which we later covered with transparent plastic (similar to the kind we used for the kitchen windows).  She then stuck a piece of cardboard at the back of the box a little higher than the box.  Then the box was covered with white paper and the panel was drawn on the top surface to give an appearance of the washing machine controls including the brand name.

We had great plans to make it look more authentic by fixing the "door" which could be opened, using foil to make the tub, throwing in some "clothes" to make it look like a wash was in progress, but as we did not have much time, we had to make do with what we had.  Perhaps the next attempt (if there is one) should look more interesting. A note here that the washing machine was the last item made on the eve of my niece’s birthday. Our idea was to take everything to their house while she was at school and assemble it in time for her to be back from school. So we really ran out of time, considering she is in school only for a few hours.

That sums up with all the furniture that we made and used but I would like to make note of a few things here. Now ideally, it is possible to find a readymade fridge, and chairs and table in the market but our ones were made from a lot of love. If in the future these break or cannot be used any more, we can always replenish with the readymade stuff.

Another thing I would like to mention here is the glue I used for the sticking of cardboard pieces together. So I used something called as the fevicol all fix (picture below). Now I really swear by this glue since the end product is really super sturdy. So much so that I even bought another tube of this for any future purpose since it is a bit hard to find in all stationary shops (my mum could not find it when we needed another tube in Bangalore). I felt the need to mention the type of glue here because believe me, I tried several types (regular fevicol and craft glues and such) and this was the one that I was the happiest with.

I hope you all enjoyed reading this post. Do comment below if you have any suggestions. I would really like appreciate all the support I can get. I hope I can come out with my next post sooner than the time I took for this one.