my Glencroft Dollhouse looked like this.
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| 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"!
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| the original sofa in "AT HOME BY THE SEA" |
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!
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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. 😎👀 |
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 Whew! What a relief! |
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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 😅 |
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| 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 😊 |
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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. |
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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! |
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| 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.  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.
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