This Old House - Vintage Dolls House Rescue

  This one was in a sorry old state when we got it. The lady who sold it was reluctant to let it go as it had been her mother's but she knew she would never find the time to restore it. Hobbies houses were sold in kit form - a bit of research and I found the image below. Inside wasn't pretty but miraculously we found all the missing windows stored in the vintage 1980s tin. The previous owners had stipped most of the paper, presumably with a chisel for the walls were gouged in places. The stairs were missing. The hallway of these houses is very narrow, so narrow I couldn't get my hand in and make a fist, so the only way we could work in the two left hand rooms was to remove the walls. Not so difficult with a small hammer. It took ages and a  great deal of wetting and scraping and weeping to get all the paper off. The house seems to have been made from a packing crate, the big black letters visible once the paper was removed. Since it had so few original features left, I had

  As you can see, this one was quite bashed up when we got it. It looked like I feel, as if it's had a long and hard life but I wasn't about to let it crumble further. Purists would probably leave it alone but I wanted to give it a proud position in my collection. My way of looking at it is, if you buy a crumbling historic building you invariably make subtle repairs to make it look and feel loved again. I kept as close to the original colour as I could. Please note the colour in the photo below is way brighter yellow than in reality. I replaced the brick paper on the bottom half like for like. Then we bent the windows back into shape - strangely they didn't need painting. I repaired the front door, painted the base and repositioned all the intact windows so they were all at the front and made fake panes for the ones that were missing and put them at the side. It immediately looked better. Inside was in remarkably good original condition so I made few changes. I added skirti