This Old House - Antique and Vintage Dolls House Rescue

DH/11 1921-1923. Dimensions: 35.5 inches [89 cm] wide, 17 inches [43 cm] deep and 35 inches [88 cm] high. There's nothing I like more than a challenge, and this DH11 was a big one! A poor specimen with no back, stripped out inside and a very tatty exterior. It had a certain charm but I still couldn't wait to begin bringing it back to its former grandeur.  The first job as always is to clean them thoroughly and check for worm and rot. This one had no worm but I treated it anyway. When I turned it over to check the bottom for marks or damage I found the base completely rotten in one corner so the first job (or the second if you count the cleaning) was to get the Trusty Assistant to make a new one. While he was doing that I stripped the roof paper and tidied up inside. This is a big house, not as big as the DH12 but it has a pleasing number of rooms but a narrow annoying to decorate stair way. To make things easier, I got TA to remove the wall to the right of the stairs in the pic...

 I've had this house for some time. When I got it the previous owners had decorated it as a 1980s house complete with fitted homemade kitchen and bathroom and modern style wall paper. For some reason, it stopped me from seeing the house's potential straight away. But then I read an article in one of the dolls house magazines about a lady who had created LongBourne, the home of the Bennets from Pride and Prejudice and I knew right away I wanted to copy her. This involved a lot of  internet searching for the house they used in filming the Colin Firth Version and close examination of pictures of the house I saw in the dolls house magazine. I am sorry, I have searched everywhere for the name of the lady who created the original but I can't find it. As you can see, it took a huge leap of imagination. The Hobbies 793 is a lovely house, very solidly made with windows all round - lots of plastic windows that were yellowed with age, and nasty plastic doors. Inside, it was tidy and i...

  Triang No. 62 1930-58. Dimensions: 27 inches [68 cm] wide, 11 inches [28 cm] deep and 17 inches [43 cm] high. I was excited to find this one for sale locally. It is the  version I've long been looking for, with the garden walls and the curved gable beams. It was in a sorry old state when I got it, filthy dirty and very rusty after years in someone's attic. There were signs of historic woodworm on the sides and upper floor and the roof had caved in at one end and there were two missing windows. Inside was dirty but the wallpaper wasn't too bad. I was able to keep quite a lot of it and the ones that couldn't be saved were decorated with repro Triang paper (from DollsHouseMan on Ebay). But, undeterred, we cracked on with it. First job was to give it a good hoover - there was even a mummified wasp in one of the gardens.   Once clean, I carefully removed all the windows and got started treating the woodworm (just in case) and filling all the holes - this took a while! Once...