The Cheltenham Dollhouse Day 8

In the last two days I worked on the dollhouse leg base.

Your base is going to be very wobbly so you have to reinforce it by glueing wood strips between the legs, all the way around. You can use dowels or square wooden sticks. You can also use miniature porch posts for added designs, like I did on the Gloucester Dollhouse. This dollhouse is going to be modern so I used plain square shaped sticks.

Turn your base upside down with the legs up, clamped down on a flat surface so it lays flat. This helps the legs stand straight up. Measure the sticks from the area of the legs that is closest to the base and then cut your stick to size. Make sure you measure all around so that all the sticks are at the same height to each other.

Once your sticks are in place between the dollhouse legs, glue and then clamp the legs together with masking tape to hold the stick tightly between them. Let everything dry overnight.

Once dry, you can use spackle to smooth out any gaps between the stick ends and the dollhouse legs.

I then painted the legs and the underside of the base. This takes a lot of time and patience. Turn the entire unit right side up to finish the painting and touch everything up as you will be viewing the dollhouse from the top down.

You can add furniture leg gliders to the bottoms of the dollhouse legs so they can protect and glide easily on your floors. The peel and stick variety is now available.

When you finally place your finished dollhouse on top of this base, it will be sturdy enough for an adult to handle it. My Gloucester has never tipped over even though I have opened and closed it many times and it contains a good amount of miniatures displayed inside. But keep in mind that the dollhouse will always have a possibility of tipping over just from the fact that the dollhouse is tall and narrow. The dollhouse itself has more bulk than the four legs holding it up. If you plan on giving this type of dollhouse to a child, make sure that you use hardware to brace it against the wall so that it can not be tipped over when opening and closing the front panels. Braces used for furniture, like drawer chests, china cabinets, etc, can be found at your local hardware store and can be added easily to the dollhouse.