Another Doll House? – Phase 1

It was over a year ago that I finished building what I thought would be my last doll house—this one for my niece’s daughter.

As I was putting up all my glue, paint, and tools, I was saddened to think I would not have another one to build.  From the beginning of the pandemic and through September of 2024, I had built a total of seven doll houses.  And I had had quite a blast doing it!

While completing that seventh doll house marked the end of a fun five years of miniature home construction, I was still actively working in the small 1/12^th world with my sister building furniture for our doll houses.

Then in April of 2025, an e-mail arrived in my inbox from one of the online doll house companies from which I had purchased miniatures for several years, Miniatures.com.  Sadly, the e-mail stated that the principals who had owned and operated the company for over fifty years had decided to retire.  The e-mail further noted that they were launching a going-out-of-business close out sale.

All of the doll houses I had built over those five years were manufactured by Real Good Toys and I was very pleased with their quality and the precision engineering of the kits.  I had never purchased a doll house kit from this company that was going out of business, so I did not know what to expect.  But they did have one that I was interested in that I had seen in their sales catalog and e-mail ads, the Garage Loft on the top right.

I debated with myself for some time whether or not I should buy this one.  With as many doll house posts I have published and the passion which has hopefully come through in my writing, you can easily imagine that I had a hard time resisting the chance to build just one more.  But when I finally decided to take the plunge, it had already sold out.

Thinking it must have been what was meant to be, I set aside that desire to build again and just focused on the furniture I was making.

Then one day, I got another e-mail message with a surprise.  In the back of their warehouse, they had discovered a couple more pallets of kits.  With the Garage Loft kit being one of those found, I immediately purchased it.

It sat in my closet for a while before I even opened it.  But when I did, I was most impressed with their quality as well.  A few days later, my sister drove over to celebrate her birthday and I taped part of it together to see what it was going to look like.

She and I then had a lot of fun thinking of ideas for this kit.

Whereas the doll house I had built for myself was a Craftsman style structure first popularized in the early 1900s, and filled with 1950s Mid Century Modern furniture, I wanted this new doll house to be completely modern both inside and out.  To this end, while visiting, she helped me decide on paint colors and explored ideas for outfitting the garage and furnishing the loft.  She also helped with flooring selections for both.

Looking at the taped together structure, it was easy to see that this kit was going to be a much less complex build than the previous seven doll houses I had built since it basically only had one large room over a double garage.  With such a simple floorplan, we knew what was going to make it most interesting looking was everything we put inside.  With my sister having access to 3-D printers, we searched online for many items that she could print for me to incorporate.

But, unlike the other doll houses that I had built with the exterior walls having pre-milled clapboards, this loft kit just had smooth exterior walls made of the same medium density fiberboard (MDF).  I searched online for images of modern garage lofts and came across a couple that I particularly liked.  These included exterior wooden slats running horizontally.  In one, the slats were stained with a shiny polyurethane finish, but the other was just painted slats.

I chose to go with a painted exterior which my sister helped me select the color.

With this exterior choice made, I needed to figure out how many slats I would need.  I decided a ½” wide basswood strip 1/16” thick would be an appropriate size since it would be equivalent to a full-scale 6” board.  I also needed to determine the right size gap between the slats.  I taped the three walls back together and clamped a couple of ½” basswood strips to the front spaced apart using a 1/16” strip of basswood.  Once I removed the 1/16” strip, it seemed this spacing looked right.

Then taking measurements of the exterior, I then determined that I would need to buy thirty-four 24-inch-long strips of basswood.

“Groundbreaking” for what I started calling “My Garage Loft” occurred on 19 August when I began painting the interior of the garage.  Typically, garages are painted some shade of white (and you know there are about a million shades of white), but I thought a light gray color would provide more interest.  I just so happened to have some leftover gray paint from 2022 when we turned our dining room into what my wife calls, her “Moroccan room.”

Two coats rolled on with a light sanding in between gave me a good clean finish for the garage interior.

Similarly, I painted the second-floor interior a light blue color that my sister had helped me pick out.

Now I was ready to paint the exterior walls which would require two separate steps: painting the walls and painting the strips of basswood.

     To be continued…