The Cheltenham Dollhouse Day 9

I am going to begin working on the interior finishes of this dollhouse. When I am done with the interior, I will finish and attach the panels. I do not want the panels to be swinging back and forth while I'm working on the inside so this is why I am leaving them for later.

I want to make the dollhouse look as much like my own real house as possible but that will be difficult because of the different lay out. I have to figure out what I want each room to be. This dollhouse does not have a foyer or a garage and it is much more closed in design than my open concept townhouse so I will have to make these separated rooms make sense.

I decided to make the large bottom room into the living room and the one next to it into a den. I will then use the large second floor room as the kitchen and the one next to it as a dining room. The small third floor room will be the bathroom and the one next to it the bedroom. My real townhouse does not have a den but I didn't want to have to make a guest bedroom and every modern house has a home office so it works out. Though I am not thrilled about having a staircase in the kitchen, I really wanted one of the large rooms to be the kitchen. So, though it might not be the ideal, and in real life it will be hard to get that third floor bathroom, in miniature, it's not too bad.

During the time that I have been assembling this dollhouse, my real life house floors changed. So, I plan on using similar flooring in this tiny replica. I am going to use wood look flooring in the same rooms as my real house. I plan on using tile in the kitchen and bathroom and I will be using carpet on the staircase steps.

I am going to try out this wood look shelf paper for the staircase risers so they match how my real house stairs look. It has a similar hue at the wood look flooring but it's not identical. I figure that it won't be noticeable on such a small scale. The wood look flooring is way too thick to use on the staircase so this shelf paper seems to be a good alternative for such a hard to access area.

I couldn't find the carpet in the exact color I wanted but it will work. The tile is a little lighter than I thought it would be so it balances it out.

I used stucco in all of the interior walls and ceilings. A good way to make the stucco have the orange peel texture that modern houses come with, is to dab it with a sponge brush. I don't know how to make knock down ceilings in this smaller scale, so I just used a regular paint brush to give the ceilings texture. None of this can be seen on the camera pictures though. The details are just too small.

I used dollhouse stucco but did not mix it with paint. I mixed it with water only until it was the consistency of cake icing. I find that when the stucco is mixed with paint, it tends to crack as it dries and you have to touch it up. I don't find this happening when it's mixed with plain water and then painted when dry.

I used white paint for the walls and ceilings because that's how my house is painted currently. I unfortunately, have not had the time to paint over the "builder's white" my house came with. I will in the future but for now, my dollhouse will have to look the same.

I painted all of the window interior and exterior window trims. My real house has the same color window frame on the interior and exterior so that's how I painted the dollhouse windows.