**Unfortunately Photobucket lost all of the original photos I had taken for this post, so I can only show the finished photos.**
I will be hinging all of the exterior doors and this process takes a lot of time and patience.
You first want to paint and/or stain all of the door components. Make sure that you keep the front doors together, especially if you plan on staining them. Their wood grain runs vertically, while the kitchen doors wood grain runs horizontally. You want both front doors to have matching wood grains and hues.
The windows for the doors must be installed in order to put the doors together. Assemble the doors according to the instructions.
I used the stained glass acrylic pane that came with the dollhouse kit for the kitchen door but decided to use a "leaded" glass scrapbook paper sheet, I had found, for the front doors.
After your doors are dry and ready, you need to dry fit them into the door openings. Sand the doors down until they fit easily into their openings. Then you can hinge them to the exterior door trim. Hinges can only be placed flat against the door and trim. Do not try to apply them as you would a real hinge, on the interior edge of the casing. The wood is too thin and fragile to allow for this and the doors are not thick enough.
I always go through this lecture every time we get to the hinging of a tab and slot dollhouse door in my assembly blogs. These doors are very heavy and the hinges are very small and delicate. The hinging of the doors will make them operational but they will not be perfect. You must handle them with care. Since these doors are being hinged manually, many things can affect the operation of the door. The most common issue is slight warping of the wall where the door opening is. Your door can swing open and closed perfectly on the door casing before installation but once the trim is glued to the opening, the door can become tense and not want to close all of the way or open all of the way. This is caused by very slight warping of the wall or misalignment in the door opening and/or trim. These dollhouses are not precise. There is nothing you can do about this. Allow the door to move up to its limit. Do not force it shut or all the way open if it does not want to. Force can pull the hinges off and then you will have real issues.
I hinged the kitchen door to the interior door trim, so that I can hinge the screen door to the exterior trim. Make sure you know which direction you want the doors to open, so you place the hinges on the proper side.
The screen door I chose is a laser cut door made by Greenleaf Dollhouses. It has to be assembled and finished before you can use it. The great thing about it is that its the proper measurement and I didn't have to trim the door down or add strip wood to it to make it larger.
I added hardware to all of the doors after I touched them up. These doors are not complete. They are missing some trim and I will add it later when I find it in the mountain of trim I have for this dollhouse. The important thing is that they are in place so I can continue the rest of the assembly.
For some reason, the hinging of these doors was particularly difficult. The wood was very hard and there was some crumbling of the wood on some of the trim. Also these L shaped hinges are not my favorite but they were the only ones I could find. The doors move perfectly on the hinges but my front doors refuse to close. They closed perfectly while off the dollhouse but there must have been some warp in the front wall that caused them to not close all of the way once they were installed. Like I mentioned above, leave them. Its nothing you did wrong and you will not be able to fix it, unless you change out the entire front wall of the dollhouse.
The side wall where the kitchen door is was much more forgiving. The kitchen door swings open and closed pretty well but my screen door refuses to close all of the way, just like the front doors. I knew this would be the case because I have to clamp the trim down very well against the wall because of warping. Again, nothing can be done about it except change the whole wall. Any trim you install on this door opening will bend in the same way and cause the same issue with the doors operation.
Some dollhouses will certainly have more issues than others but at least you get some detailed, working doors, that allow you to view the interior of the dollhouse better.
