THE DOWER HOUSE / my GLENCROFT DOLLHOUSE RENOVATION -Part 1

Once Upon A Time, way back in 1998
 my Glencroft Dollhouse looked like this.

During its heyday in the late 80's and 90's, my GLENCROFT dollhouse won a FIRST PLACE Blue Ribbon🏅 along with The BEST OF SHOW Award 🏆 at The Miniature Club of B.C. Show and Sale. 

Shortly thereafter, 
my friend Janine minworks.blog convinced me to take this dollhouse across the border to the annual Seattle Washington Miniature Show and Sale where it won another BEST OF SHOW Award! 🏆

WHOO HOOO!😁 HOORAY FOR ME!  😁

                I'd named this project: "AT HOME BY THE SEA" and had decorated the interior in a nautical theme, using a repeating colour pallet of burgundy, rose, pinks, and a range of greens from dark to light; intermixed with plenty of white woodwork. I'd even installed a music box which plays "Somewhere beyond the Sea"" a tune made famous by the late, great Bobby Darin . ❤️

The interior soft furnishing, were composed of layers of over-scaled florals coupled with bold geometrics inspired by Real Life interior designer Betsy Speerts coastal California residence, along with the influence of Mario Buatta, the self-styled "Prince of Chintz"! 

the original sofa in 
"AT HOME BY THE SEA"

I also made my very first wrap around miniature garden composed primarily of collected plastic foliage, silk and/or dried, plant materials to fill the garden with.  

I thoroughly enjoyed building this dollhouse back in late 80's and I was really pleased that it'd won the awards. 

THEN, as it happened in the early 2000's, I sold my home and everything was packed up including this dollhouse, which was stored in the garage.  As I put down new roots in a new neighborhood, all of my miniatures were put on hold, and for the next 12 years, I focused most of my time and attentions on my Real Life house and its very large garden.

And as for my Glencroft, I completely lost interest in it.  I hardly paid it any mind as it sat year after year after year, gathering dust inside my garage. 

It wasn't until 2012, that I finally felt like getting back into my miniatures again, but rather than tackle something BIG, I decided that my first miniature project would be to finish a small garden roombox I'd half-heartedly begun back in the late 90's entitled "GOTHICA" 🏆🏅which was immediately followed by #43 Green Dolphin Street 🏆🏆(my Greenleaf Arthur dollhouse); then  Land's End(an HBS Creatin Contest house kit which btw, is still a work in progress); then  Villa Leone🏅(the Greenleaf Willowcrest kit) completed in 2019 ;  then back again to Land's End ; and then another small Christmas roombox entitled Victorian Bliss dedicated to the memory of my mother, also completed in 2019.  

Over time, my Studio E became chockablock full of craft supplies and dollhouse projects both big and small/ past and pending, whilst my old Glencroft dollhouse continued moldering away inside my garage. 

It wasn't until the summer of 2021, 21 years later- that the time had come, to bring her into the Big House.  

Initially, my plan was just to clean it up and remake the  original garden with the multitude of plants I'd made throughout the last 2 years of covid, but then it occurred to me that this was a golden opportunity to redo the entire dollhouse, both inside and out! 

        I'd built this kit when I was relatively"young";
                now I'm a whole lot older and
      I've learned a few tricks along the way-  

       and although my measuring and cutting skills
                 Still SUCK!😫
                  I'm much better at fudging 😜

                           not to mention~  

                        the art of disguise. 😎👀

EVEN SO,
once I'd hauled it into the house and onto
my dining room table all I did was look at it
for the next 3 weeks.
I didn't know what to do with it other than to gut it,
 so I started with that. 



The first job I tackled 
 was to remove the crumbling garden.
The original flower beds had been constructed from flower foam covered with white glue
and coffee grounds.   
The dried flowers I'd planted 30 years ago,
had faded to the colour of mud and the silk ones were filthy dirty. 
I scrapped everything and 
 wasn't sorry to see any of it go. 



As mentioned:
My new garden would be dressed with the masses of garden plants I'd made
the year before,
but first things first- 

 

I needed to get serious with the interior. 

Back in the 80's,
I'd covered all the interior walls with printed cotton backed with iron-on interfacing,
 glued directly to the walls.  

Even after all those years of residing in my frigid garage,
it stayed stuck to the walls like limpets to a rock! 


It required a pair of heavy duty pliers, a paint scraper,
and a dogged determination to get it off 
shred by shred!  
Stripping the walls and stripping the garden were both very messy jobs and
the debris went everywhere! 

 Meanwhile-
all my tools and supplies were being shuttled  into the dining room where
 they began to pile up on the table; then under the table;
  on the chairs; on the floor; and up against the walls.
 Arrrrgggg!

The mess in the dining room was stressing me out! 😱 

I had to get the Glencroft into my Studio 
where my tools were and where I can
close the door! 

Reconfiguring my tiny jam-packed workroom to accommodate my dollhouse
on it's wide platform base,
 was definitely a challenge, but eventually
 I managed to squeeze it in. 

Whew!  What a relief! 

The old colour scheme of pink, green and white was totally dated and I was ready for a radical change. 
I tried out many different patterned wallpapers
in a variety of different colours 
but in the end,
 I went right back to PINK! 
I guess PINK was meant to be 😅

The sisal wall to wall carpeting in living room had been ideal for my seaside cottage theme,
however,
I ended up replacing it with hardwood flooring since  
I have loads of leftover unused ext. siding
 from the Villa Leone/ Willowcrest project
which will made great wide floorboards
AND
WAS SUPER EASY TO CUT!
 Waste Not, Want Not 😊

The kits long mantle shelf which runs the width of the fireplace wall- I shaved off along with the gothic fireplace surround,
although I did leave the sealed storage doors
and the painted panelling intact.  
 

I also removed the handrail, the balusters, AND the upstairs  bedroom wall so that I could rip off the fabric in the stairwell for repapering,
 but 
OH MY!
it's STILL difficult to get my big hand inside
this narrow space!

 

Scraping off the little signal flags was easier than I thought except for the ones at the top of the staircase, 

 but stripping the rest of the house was awful, since most of the interfacing continued to put up a fight! 

  

 

meanwhile-

Here's what the living room looked like
in November- December 2021
At this stage, I had enlarged the front door opening for a new door and had made a new set of leaded windows, which to be honest, 
I wasn't at all happy with. 
 I've already remade them and will give a BRIEF outline of the entire process in PART 2 of this post.



The above photo was from when I first laid the electrical tape in the 80's

Once the room was down to the bare bones 
I had to tackle 

THE ELECTRICS

 Half of the old tape wiring in the living room 
still worked but 
 to get it to stay working
ahhh
"therein lies the rub!"
 🧐
It was FINE one minute then shorting out the next-
what a headache! 😖

yet... long before I actually gutted the room,
I organized a floor plan with all the furniture 
I hoped to use
as seen in the photo above,
 then I took pictures to remind myself later as to where the various task lamps would go.
  
However, 
I first needed to see what kind of light I could expect from each of their proposed positions. 

 I had a pair of iron look sconces which I'd originally purchased for Villa Leone from
SP MINIATURES for over the stone fireplace.  
I stuck them to the wall with blue tack 
and hooked them up to a transformer
to see how much light they'd cast
 in the room. 

They produced LOTS of light! 
which meant that 
 the Pole lamp
 which I'd been seriously considering for beside the sofa,
was unnecessary. 

Above and below are the proposed positions of the table lamps along with the illumination coming from the sconces over the fireplace

I still needed to illuminate the left side of the living room so that the secretary wasn't left in the shadows. 
You'll get to see those results in Part 2.

The next phase was to remove everything and begin  hooking up the sconces, drilling through the wood panelled wall and eventually leading the wires down and  out of both sides of the fireplace to be connected to the electrical tape on the floor. 

Above is the finished product

The "fire" in the fireplace is a string of orange LED's from Dollarama,
(look for them right before halloween)
I had to drill a hole from the outside of the Glencroft to feed the wire into the fireplace. 
Later on,
I'll disguise the double AA battery pack under a tidy stack of chopped wood at the side of the house. 


The orange lights are positioned behind a veil
of super fine
red mesh
which diffuses the light and causes it to look like flames.
 ❤️🔥❤️🔥❤️
I Absolutely LOVE the look of this fire! 
I turn it on EVERY TIME I look into this house- 
it's so romantic
but that's all I'm going to write about it
 and the living room for now
as this post is already SUPER LONG

Stay tuned for Part 2 later this month. 

bye for now

                 p.s.  it feels good to be back on the blog!

                                           😃❤️

p.s.s.  If you can't wait - you can see the finished living room of THE DOWER HOUSE on my instagram page- the link is in the Header.

elizabeth