WARNING:This Hobby Could Seriously Damage You Bank Balance! (Dollshouses)

Member Name: Lucille

Product:	Dollshouses
Date:	12/02/01 (158 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Great fun. Real sense of achievement when it is finished

Disadvantages: Can cost a fortune!

My daughter was brought a flat pack dolls house kit from The Dolls House Emporium for her birthday, (she was two!), by a well meaning but childless relative. It was left to me and her Daddy to construct and decorate the kit until it looked like an elegant six roomed home. This has been some task, but it has been one we have enjoyed. The only problem has been taking out the second mortgage we needed to complete the thing!

The kit itself cost £150. For this we received the house in pieces. It is made in good quality MDF, and is strong enough to last many years. We also received all the windows, stairs and doors to complete the house. However it was completely undecorated, and the kit does not supply any of the many things you need to decorate the house. First of all we had to buy paint. Two colours, white and a nice blue. My husband painted all the relevant parts and started to put it together.

He then had to install the lightening. This is done by making a circuit through the house using copper tape. We brought the lighting kit from the Dolls House Emporium, and it cost £65.80. For this we got all the lights for each room, the copper tape and a transformer to run the circuit from.

After that it was a case of carpeting and decorating the rooms. We brought self-adhesive carpets at £2.30 a piece. You could, of course use off cuts of carpet if you had them, but as we did not, we had to buy them. If you wanted to you could buy real wood parquet flooring at £22, but we decided our house wasn't quite that smart! We did have to buy stair carpets, (two flights don't you know), and all the stair rods to fit them with. A real snip at £3.10 for each carpet, and £11.50 for each set of rods. The Dolls House Emporium also sells wallpaper for the houses. They are all priced at £1.20 a sheet, but we decided to use sample papers from the local DIY shop, because they are free! But of course we did have to buy wallpaper paste to hang the paper with. A
ll that was left then was to buy the roof paper with grey tiles on to finish off the house.

Finally our house looks beautiful. There is an elegant dinning room, a comfortable living room, a pretty kitchen, a sumptuous bathroom, and two bedrooms in which a little family can relax in style. However, all these wonderful rooms are unfurnished! With prices including £16.80 for a sofa and £18.40 for a bed, they will probably stay that way for a while!

Having said all this, it has been great fun putting this dolls house together, and I have really enjoyed it. There must be cheaper ways to do it; we had to do it this way as our daughter was brought the kit to start with. If you built the house yourself using a plan rather than a pre cut kit, you would save a lot of money.

Now, if you will excuse me, I need to go and decide which colour bed linen the bed in the main bedroom will have for when I place my next order!

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