When you're putting up the first parts of the structure, it will be very hard to keep everything together. As you add more walls to the structure, you will have more areas you can clamp, so it will become sturdier as you move along. Do not stop adding pieces at any point while building the shell of your dollhouse. Each wall helps the other walls stay together, so in order to have a nice squared dollhouse, you're going to want to put up all the shell walls together at the same time. That way they can all dry together clamped squarely.
In order to keep the tabs of the staircase rail's center wall from falling out of the first floor slots, wrap them with masking tape once they’re in from underneath the dollhouse.
Once all of your walls are up, stop. Clamp everything together tightly. Check the entire dollhouse from all sides, top and bottom to make sure all joints are tightly together. Then use wood glue to go over all the joints. You're going to have to wait until this whole shell is dry before you can add anything else to it.
As you can see in the photos, the birch wood is very smooth, splinter free and has a nice uniform color, but it can be quite soft. The pieces are easily broken. It does not have the same sturdiness as regular plywood.
Thankfully with this wood, sanding is mostly not needed. There have been very few areas that I’ve had to sand very lightly. Over all, your sanding block can take a break. Because there’s no delaminating wood and everything is so smooth, you can certainly paint the interior walls and they would look great.
Even though the wood is excellent quality, I still primed my walls. This is still an important step because no matter what type of wood you're working with, it's still raw wood.
Notice I also primed the floors. That’s because I’m not going to stain them. I printed out some special flooring designs from my computer. Since this is a small cottage, I decided it was okay to print the flooring. A larger dollhouse will waste your printer ink and ink can be quite expensive, so do the math before you decide to save on miniature flooring by printing out your own. Sometimes store bought miniature flooring can turn out to be the better bargain.
This cottage has a strange shape, so you're going to have to plan carefully how you want to distribute your rooms. This will decide how your wallpaper patterns will be. I decided to split the tall room in half and put two different wallpaper patterns on it. I measured and roughly marked where the bottom wallpaper pattern will end and the top one begin. I have to wallpaper before I put on the flooring. The flooring is too delicate to apply first.
When you buy scrapbook paper for your dollhouse, make sure you turn the paper around because many scrapbook papers are reversible. The one I bought for the upstairs had a pattern on one side which I thought made everything look too busy, especially with the designed flooring. I used the back instead which had a textured look.
After I wallpapered all of the walls, I applied the flooring. Keep in mind that anything printed from your printer is very delicate. The ink can bleed or change hue if anything moist touches it. Make sure you apply adhesive in a clean area and not get any on the printed side. You might have to patch your pattern because letter sized paper is often too small for the wall or floor of a dollhouse. I had to patch around the edge of the pattern, so it reached the walls. I used a glue stick to apply the paper. Anything wetter will warp, crease or rip the paper.
