Halloween

A friend of mine has recently become addicted to Kat the hats Hats and I can see why they are works of art I now have a plan for my conservatory over the next year and I may also become addicted lol.

Anyway after following her blog she is having a halloween party over this weekend. I have not got any Mini halloween items to show (the conservatory might be turning dark over the next 12 months) but evey year we make a pumpkin with our daughter so I thought I would show them to you.

Last year we made a Bat Pig, which was my daughters idea

This year all the pumpkins in the garden where quite small and there was one that wasn't ripe, this gave my daughter the idea of a toad so thats what we did

Happy Halloween Everyone!!

Oh My I almost forgot...

I have just bought the perfect TV for my modern House, I wanted something that looked real, and what would look more real than an actual working TV!!!

My Husband thinks I'm mad, and so does every other non mini person I speak to but I love it. I haven't installed it yet as I'm still working out how to put it in without needing to drill a bog hole in the wall, and also at the moment I only seem to have leads that will connect up to my Wii, but it works

Here are some pictures of it connected to the Wii and sized up against our real TV.

Sorry for the delay in blogging

OK I've been holding off showing you the bedroom, mainly because I designed and made my own bed in there and I don't want anyone to copy it before I make my decision on it. I would like to sell it but don't want to get ripped off by people copying it so I'm still looking into how to copyright it and how to go about all of this, as its new to me, any suggestions would be warmly welcome.

In the mean time I'm trying to decide what to do with the bathroom its a deep narrow room and I just cant decide how I want it. So far I have tiled it with white tiles but now I think its to much, my next plan was to change the floor covering, but now I'm thinking a complete overhaul of it. I'm doing my own lighting in this room with spot light so I need to sort out the arrangement of furniture before I can get on with that, but I'm so stuck on the walls and floor I feel like I'm never going to get there.

I'm currently working on another project at the moment but I cant tell you too much about that until Christmas as its part of a THING that the Dolls House Forum I'm a member of does and I don't want them finding out, but once its all finished and revealed I will post pictures here as well.

Time For The Living Room

Here is my Living Room.

As you can see I continued the wallpaper through from the kitchen to help with the feel of it being open planned. The stairs are carpeted and I wanted some of the features of the house to show that this has been a family home for a long time. The stair rail that I made and added I kept in wood to give it a throw back feel to the 90's or earlier. The fire place surround is still in place but has been updated with the fire being removed and a new stainless steel boarding to cover the chimney hole (not that there is one really).

The floor is from Sue Ryder Care as well as the lava lamp and ceiling lights, I have a third set of these that I am going to use as a tall standard lamp.

The Sofa and Armchair are made by the Dolls House Emporium, although I purchased mine form a kind friend who was selling hers.

The bookcase you can see in the corner started life and a Jane Harrop kit, her 1930's kitchen cabinet. The plan originaly was to make it up but have it as a modern laptop bureau where the flap would act as a desk. Unfortunately I had some trouble assembling this kit so adapted it into a bookcase and changed the handle to jewellery findings.

That Dream Table

I searched everywhere for a suitable dining table for this room. I wanted something modern and unusual but I don't have a large budget for my house so I had to be reasonable in my expectations. I fell in love wit this table as soon as I saw it, I drooled over it for months whilst I tried to track down a company that either sold it in the UK or would ship to the UK. I contacted a couple of stores in America but I found them very unhelpful, they would not confirm how much the table would cost and how much the shipping would be to the UK both things I needed to know before I could make the decision if I could afford it. In the end I contacted ByBarb Miniatures directly and was met by a very kind return email from Barb herself who was so helpful and kindly allowed me to purchase it directly from her.

When it arrived I was so excited and over the moon with it. I also bought a chair from her as well although this is to be used in a future room. I love ByBarb Miniatures she is so talented and all her pieces are truly scrumptious, if I had the money I would buy many more things from her.

Then came the task of finding some chairs to go with the fabulous table, in the end I settled for these four chairs from ebay. Im not completely set on them but I think they work well enough for now.

A Question of Scale? And Do I Add An Extra Room?

After completing to some extent my kitchen (there's always work left to do on rooms) I moved on to the other ground floor room, this was to fit the living area and dinning area into. I wasn't sure there was enough room so the plan was to put a door in the side of the property going into a conservatory that would be the dinning room. The first problem I hit was after purchasing an external door I found the door on my property where smaller than most Dolls House doors

This meant that if I used a ready made door it would look all out of scale. It also made me doubt the scale of my house but after some measuring and discussing with my fellow dolls house friend I confirmed it was 1:12 just with small doors. My local Dolls house shop confirmed that there is a make of dolls houses that have smaller doors and unfortunately they don't sell replacements.

My next step was to make a door that would fit with the scale of the others and I came up with this.

On a browsing of one of my local Sue Ryder Care Shop I found a reduced but slightly battered conservatory that I thought I might just squeeze a dinning room into.

After getting it home and having a stare I soon realised that this was too small to fit any 1:12 dinning room tables in, so its now been put to one side until I can think of a suitable alternative use for it.

I decided that it might be a better idea to make the ground floor open plan so I removed the full wall with door into the kitchen and replaced it with the angled wall that would run along the other side of the stairs. I latter made my own rail for the open side of the stairs. This gave me more room under the stairs to fit in a dinning area. This also meant I now no longer needed to do any major kit bashing phew!

The Perfect Modern Kitchen

I spent ages trying to track down the kitchen that was just right. I bought this kitchen originally but found it was slightly out of scale and just did not feel right.

So then my hunt began again for the perfect modern kitchen, which is when I found Elf Miniatures  I bought the FLEXI kit base pack - plain with the glass top. I did the kitchen with black self adhesive film then after some more thinking decided against using the glass top and bought some more aluminium sheets from Elizabeth at Elf to give the kitchen a stainless steel look. Elizabeth's customer services is great and I can highly recommend her. The floor is a sample of kitchen wallpaper from B&Q's and the oven I got from Ebay. I love this kitchen, all I need to do now is decide what Im going to do about the upper part, whether to have cupboards or shelves?