For my daughter’s fourth birthday we decided to get her a dollhouse. After searching around, I wasn’t very into the pre-fab ones from Target or Walmart. I also wanted something a little smaller in size since Ella is only four. Although, I may have had another hidden agenda with wanting a smaller size – the plan is to actually hang this dollhouse on the wall in Ella’s room. Thus giving her another option for play during her quiet time each day!
Supplies
We found this dollhouse at Ikea which was the perfect size, price, and could be mounted on the wall. I obviously didn’t love the wood color with the green chimney, but I knew I was going to makeover the whole thing anyway. In terms of the makeover – it wasn’t all that difficult ASIDE from gathering the supplies during a pandemic. Thankfully I bought the dollhouse months ago, but the rest of the supplies were quite hard to come by in a time when Amazon isn’t as reliable and Hobby Lobby is closed.
I would have preferred to get furniture and other furnishings from Hobby Lobby and paint it myself. Since that wasn’t an option, I found the furniture set, chandelier, and mirror on Amazon, and luckily was able to get them in time. I think they turned out pretty well!
Lastly, I purchased the fun plastic swing and pillows from The DayDream Republic and I could have purchased every piece they offer. So cute!
How To
I began with painting the exterior, floors, and ceilings white. I also chose which wallpaper I wanted for each room (just scrapbook paper) and painted the wall colors to match both her bedroom and the wallpaper. I used these acrylic paints, however, the white was taking several coats to cover the wood. We had some paint leftover from painting our banisters so I switched to that and only needed one coat to finish it up.
After the paint was dry, I measured the back walls and cut the scrapbook paper to size. I then used ModPodge to stick the paper onto the back walls of the dollhouse. I did one coat under the paper and one coat over the paper.
We hung the chandelier and the swing using small, screw in hooks from the roof. I super glued the mirror onto the wall. To spruce up the furniture, I used a rose gold paint on all of the knobs and the base of the lamps.
The Amazon furniture came with some odd bedding. Since I basically put this all together the night before her birthday (did I mention I’m a procrastinator?), I really didn’t have time to sew new bedding. Instead, I cut out two squares slightly bigger than each piece of bedding and the pillows. Then I just hot glued them around the bedding it came with. This was a super quick fix to make the bedding and pillows match everything else a little better.
Since it’s a smaller dollhouse, here are the dolls I recommend that will fit nicely.
And that was it! I think I’m just as excited to play with it as Ella is, and her little brother loves it too! Please leave me any questions in the comments. Happy crating!