how to wallpaper a dollhouse

I'm making progress on my dollhouse renovation. I love the exterior paint colours and have been slowly building up layers of white paint inside to cover all the colours. Here are some work in progress shots. As you can see, there is a lot of bright paint to cover! One of the first things I did was remove the plexiglass windows which were dark and covered in paint. Then there was a lot of sanding and scraping and cleaning to do.

Yesterday, after a third layer of white paint that didn't cover the bright green on the upstairs walls, I decided to try wallpaper. Here are some pictures of the process and some tips if you want to try it yourself!

0. Choose some paper! I went to a few stores looking at wrapping paper before I found this paper in Flow magazine (it was a good excuse to buy the magazine as well, which I love).

1. Make a paper template of the area you want to cover, especially if there are windows involved. I have little window sills that needed to poke through the paper. Very important: measure at least three times before you cut the actual paper!

2. Cut out your paper template,

3. and try it on the wall. If you look closely, you can see that there is some wall showing through at the top of the window, so I adjusted my template accordingly. If you measure correctly, then cutting the actual wallpaper should go smoothly.

4. Cut the wallpaper. I used a quilters ruler as a guide to make sure everything was perfectly straight and squared up.

5. Try it on inside the walls. My paper didn't fit all the way around both walls, so its important to make a fold on one paper to go around the corner and start the other paper in the corner on top of the folded paper, so there is no gap.

6. Using your template, cut out the windows and window sills.

7. Another way to make sure the windows are positioned correctly is to place the paper inside, and mark the back with a pencil, especially if the corners of your windows are not completely square.

8. Once the paper is cut out, I used modge podge glue to attach it. This meant working quickly, putting down a layer of glue and smoothing it out with an old drivers license and then putting more modge podge on top to act as a varnish, that is especially important around the windows so that the paper doesn't tear when it is handled.

9. The finished room! And because I was so motivated, I right away laid the floor upstairs. I'll post a tutorial another time.

I'm very happy with how it turned out, and am thinking about whether I want to wallpaper downstairs as well (the white paint did a better job of covering downstairs, so it isn't strictly necessary). If I had had the time though, I would have gotten a wallpaper swatch from my spoonflower shop. The swatches are only $5 and are 12 x 24", so would have been the perfect size for the wall. Since they are peel and stick, I wouldn't have had to mess about with glue. So if you want to try this project, head over to my shop and buy a swatch of peel and stick wallpaper :-)

Here's a shot of the dollhouse how it looks now. You can see the exterior paint colours and the floor as well as the two different papers I used as wallpaper upstairs.

dollhouse renovation

I found a dollhouse! Carried it home and have been sanding, filling in holes and now painting. Here are some pictures from before I started renovating:

And now I'll get started on the second coat of paint. Its going to be white inside (bone china to be precise) with white trim outside and dark (breton) blue.

ps. today there is another free shipping day in my spoonflower shop, for 12 hours only!

living room stripes

The kitchen had horizontal stripes, so the living room got vertical ones. We were going for café latte brown but it turned out more of a gold colour. Before that, the wall was pink, with flowers to match the lamp shade and chairs: you can see the wall in the background here and here.

What I especially like about this wall is the white wooden rim above the stripes: painted white, sawed to fit and nailed into place.

kitchen before and after

what do you think of this before and after? The dark green was getting a bit overwhelming, so we painted blue and white stripes, which makes the room seem a lot bigger. Here's a close-up of one corner:

I made the little flowers out of paint chips that I had collected while deciding on what colour blue would look best. I folded the petals out a bit and fastened them to the wall with pins. 

sofa reupholstery

While we were on our honeymoon we bought 8 metres of this dark grey upholstery material, hoping it would be enough to cover the sofa, thinking it would probably only cover the pinky-peach colour. Thankfully with a lot of measuring I managed to cover everything but the pillows. Most of the work was taking out the hundreds and hundreds of staples.

hallway

I spent a weekend in Brummen at my parent's place and worked hard on renovating. The stairs need a lot of sanding, as in extremely much sanding. I also worked very hard blasting them with steam trying to get the glue and gunk and old bits of carpet off. They got painted white (more layers were added later) and the railing white to match. Then we drove to Fixit in Zutphen. What a nice store! The paint color chosen and when we were back I starting taping the line for the blue, working late into the night. Early the next morning I was up again, the painting was fun, especially because it covered so well. I love the combination of the pink flowers against the wall color with the white stairs and rail.
On the third picture you can see a bit of the floor in the hall which was another project that weekend. My mother got two big scraps of linoleum and I spent a lot of time measuring, mapping out and cutting the linoleum to fit the hallway. The two walls aren't quite parallel!

cars and trucks

painted a few weeks ago for Lucas Brunner. I copied the designs of the cars and trucks from the curtains. While Damaris sewed curtains I painted.

beach chair

my latest "garbage" find recycled. I took it apart, cleaned and painted it and sewed a new back. Its a perfect chair for sitting on the balcony with a cup of coffee and a book.

reupholstry

maybe some of you remember the little red easy chairs. this is one of them now. I added padded and cut out the pieces following the patterns of the red material. used little nails to fasten things together, I wish I had some nicer upholstery nails. 

painting

on the weekend I visited Lydia and painted her bedroom wall. inspiring to start thinking about what colour I want for my own wall! moving to a different room in a little over a month.