Doll house Part 4: Bed, Bath and Beyond

Hi everyone! I call this post “Bed, Bath and Beyond” inspired from the name of a famous shop (I keep hearing about it on Shark tank). I call it so because I decided to blog about both the bedroom and bathroom in this post.

If someone has not read my earlier posts then I would recommend reading about those since I may not go into too much detail for some of the steps which I would have described in detail in earlier posts.

BEDROOM

In terms of the design of the room, my mom made it pretty identical as the living room. So if you want to know more about it you can refer to the other post on the living room.

As you can see, the furniture in this picture includes my other masterpiece the bunk bed, a dresser table, bookshelf, picture frame and a rug. When I first gave my niece the doll house, she kind of demanded for the book shelf so I added this later on. (I have edited out the voices in the introductory video of the doll house, but those family and friends who had seen the unedited version can hear her cute voice going “where is the book shelf?”

I will start from the easy ones then go to the tougher parts of the furniture.

1. Picture frame:

This was pretty easy to make (I guess, since my mom made this). She took the picture of the parrot and gave a border with some golden cloth and then stuck this to the wall. Again like a lot of pictures we have used in the doll house came out of a desk calendar.

2. Rug:

At the time that I made these things, I had not originally intend to blog about the process so I don’t have many pictures of the making. The pictures I had were those that I used to share with my mom when I was making them. I made this rug when I was with her in Bangalore and literally minutes before I went to pick up my niece from school on her birthday so I don’t have any pictures of the making.

Basically, the process was pretty simple. I took some long pieces of wool all of the same length. I tied these pieces at one end and then made a plait (like the hair) with the wool. Girls my age would identify with this process, since it is similar to the kind we used to make for homemade friendship bands when we were younger. Now since I wanted this to be thick instead of taking three strands of wool, I took nine strands with three in each section while making the plait.

Once I was done with the plait, I stuck it together with glue in a concentric manner. Now since I was having a bit of difficulty with the stability of the same, I cut out a round piece of paper and then started sticking it to the paper in the same concentric manner. My rug was not too big, but you can take a call on how big you want it and accordingly use longer strands of wool. Considering I ran out of time that was the best I could do in terms of size. I would have personally preferred it to be a bit bigger though, like a big circular carpet.

3. Book shelf:

I used a box from some old electronic item that I had (I don’t remember what it was of). One half of the box I made the main frame and from the other half of the box I cut out strips of cardboard and made the shelves. This was easy enough and I then painted this in a metallic purple shade.

To fill in the bookshelves, on the top shelf I cut out the key ring part and put the little houseboat that my niece loved, like a show piece. Similarly, with the bottom shelf where I put in some shells (see the last of the three pics, the others don’t have this as I had set it, a four year-old has played with it remember). For the other shelves, I made some books of different sizes. 

These books were openable and had pages and everything. And they were really very simple to make. I cut out strips of paper of the same size and stuck the middle parts together. To give it a bit more stability I cut out a small piece of cellotape and went one round around the centre of the book.

Now as you might be able to see from the picture, I did not use plain strips of paper. I used newspaper pieces and the paper from the advertisements that come with the newspapers so that it would not look too plain. I also made a few hard bound books. For this, I used a single piece of cardboard for the outer most layer and folded it to the shape I wanted (the third picture is that of a hardbound book). Now for these to maintain the shape of books, it might need a weight on it overnight so that it holds it’s shape.

4. Dresser:

Things you need here are some matchboxes, cardboard and some aluminium foil. Along with glue and paint that is.

So I used a total of 6 matchboxes, three on each side. I stacked them up and then used a piece of cardboard on top to join these stacks. I originally planned to have these drawers openable and in hindsight that is pretty easy to do. But when I was making this, I made the mistake of using another piece of cardboard to join the back. At the time I was doing this for stability. Only after I was done sticking did I realize that the drawers would not open out now. If you want to have openable drawers, you can skip the step of sticking anything at the back. Or you can try sticking it only to the frame such that there is no glue on the back of the match box as such. You can also use some small pebbles painted and attach it to each drawer like handles.

Once I was done with this I cut out a piece of cardboard for the mirror and covered it with aluminium foil. I stuck it to the drawers in such a way that part of it was stuck to the cardboard at the back and the rest was on top. Now if you have skipped the step of the additional cardboard at the back then you can stick it directly to the edge of the top. I also stuck a strip of cardboard to the bottom. Like a foot rest.

All I had to do now was paint it. And voila, my dresser was ready.

5. Bunk Bed:

In the first picture you can see the kind of boxes I used for both levels. I then made the mattress for the beds. I measured out pieces of scotchbrite scrub pads (similar to those I used for my sofas) and covered that with cloth. I used two to three layers of scrub pad for each mattress until I felt it was suitable enough to come till the top of the whole box.

Now the toughest part of the bunk bed was how to make the two layers stand with a gap between them. I tried out a few ideas, including using some items to make pillars. But these ideas were not seeming to work. Finally, I decided to use cardboard to reinforce two of the sides. You can see in the picture that I have reinforced with cardboard both of the back sides which are against the wall.

For the ladder, I used ice cream sticks and cut out and stuck them to form a ladder. I used two longer pieces for the sides and connected them with small horizontal pieces.

All that was left to do was to paint the bed and ladder. I chose red for the bed and green for the ladder.

My mom made these green pillows to go with the bunk bed. She stitched three sides of the green cloth and then after inverting it (making it inside out), she filled it with foam and stitched the last side.

BATHROOM

For the bathroom, the pattern for the floor and walls was same, wrapping paper for the walls and handmade paper for the floor. However, she managed to find this type of chart paper which looked a lot like tiles. For the window she tried to make it like our bathroom windows with slits. In the below pictures, the first one is a reference to show you what she was trying. We have such windows in our Indian bathrooms. With slits in the glass. To the right is what she came up with.

The furniture pieces in the bathroom are the bathtub, wash basin with mirror, commode and shower. And blue was the colour theme for my bathroom.

1. Bathtub:

Early on I knew exactly what to use to make this. Although my mom didn’t agree with me until she saw the final product. I used one half of an old spectacle case to make the tub. I just had to paint it and make the handle and tap.

For both the handle and the tap, I used some rolled paper covered with aluminium foil and cellotape. The trick to differentiate however, was the manner in which I stuck it to the tub. For the handle I folded and stuck both sides of it. For the tap I coiled one end and stuck the other end to the tub.

2. Washbasin and mirror:

I again used a box for the main counter. However, I did not get the exact shape and size of box that I wanted and so had to cut and stick it until I was happy with the outcome. On the top surface of the box I cut out an oval shape out for where I would attach the basin. I painted the box blue and painted on red cupboards with little blue handles.

For the basin, I used a shell which I painted yellow and stuck it into the hole. Another variation to do this would be directly to stick it to the cardboard without cutting out the hole. You could even attach this to a table like structure if you don’t want to use a box. I made a tap similar to the one I used in the bathtub and stuck it to the back.

For the mirror I made it similar to the one in the dresser table but here I used chart paper to make a boundary and stuck it directly on the wall.

3. Shower:

I used a box which was open in the front and I cut out the bottom and then I painted it blue. Similar to the taps I used earlier I made a shower head and stuck it to the top. To make the shower curtain, I used a transparent plastic sheet. To connect it to the box I wrapped this sheet around some straw (drinking straw) which I connected to the top of the box. Just a note here that I cut and used the plastic from the covering that came with some regular sketch pens.

4. Commode:

This was the toughest part to make. Since it was not very easy trying to think what items to use to make it look like a real commode. There were few really good ideas on the internet but we didn’t have those products handy. We even had some trials based on these ideas but this was not turning out the way we wanted to and was becoming very messy.

Finally, we decided on the following- we used the cap of a mouthwash bottle, and for the back portion we used an empty tic tac box. Initially I was convinced that this was good enough. But my mom felt we should also have something that looks like a toilet seat cover.

If I had more time I would have perhaps even made a toilet seat with cardboard. My mom used this box of fevicol for all her sticking which had a blue round cover which we thought was perfect. Now, rather than sticking it completely, I used a piece of paper to create a flap. What I did was, I used a rectangular piece of paper, painted blue so it is not very noticeable. I stuck half of this to the fevicol cover and the other half to the front of the tic tac box. As you can see in the picture it is an open-able top.

With that, I end this post on the doll house. It was a journey for me and mom. And actually I have a lot of other ideas too. But it’s not very convenient being in a different city as my niece. I was also considering making some terrace furniture. Some easy table and chairs, an umbrella (like patio furniture basically) and something like a water tank.

I would like to end my doll house chronicles by saying that these were just some ideas that I found convenient to use. The internet is vast with ideas and DIYs. Also, we were on a race against time so towards the end some of the painting and sticking may look a bit messy. But a lot of love and thought went into the making and although we might have some minor regrets on how some things could have turned out we had a great time doing this. So it was definitely worth the effort.