When making my miniature gardens I've been including more and more miniature figures and buildings that i have made myself. I’ve found myself really enjoying this and wanting to make more but some of the ideas I've had don’t really lend themselves to the garden concept and are better suited to their own dedicated scene or diorama. I've been following some amazing miniature artists for a while (such as @peculiarlyashley and @harknettstudios). Then one day I saw a cheap kit for a small wooden house and bought it immediately. It sat in basement under a pile of untouched craft supplies for about a year until I was finally ready to take on this, frankly daunting, project. As usual I wanted to do something a bit different. I thought of various horror themes but none of them seemed to scratch that itch for me. There are some amazing haunted houses online but they've been already been done. Then one day I was reminiscing about my (somewhat misspent) youth and the perfect scene came to me- a punk squat. I had spent a fair amount of time in squats of varying levels of decay and depravity (as well as some particularly well loved and carefully maintained ones) and remember those days fondly (most of them anyway...). I began to compile a list of “must haves” I felt needed to be included and asked friends on Facebook to give me some of the things that they felt should be featured too. Then I put the kit together and got started!
“mistake” number one. Not too much of an issue but im not so good with measurements and realised this kit made a house quite a bit smaller than your average dolls house. This means that premade dollhouse furniture won't fit and I'll have to make everything from scratch. Bit more work than I had originally anticipated but who doesn't love a challenge?!
The house in question.
Now I could see the layout and rooms I figured out what I was doing with each one and made some lists of some of the details I wanted to include. I decided to go with: bedroom, bathroom, kitchen and living room/gig room (combined the 2 so I didn't have to build a basement!)
Ooh spooky ghost! - maybe it is a haunted house after all! 😨😂
So, where to start? I had already had ideas of making a replica gig venue/squat toilet so decided to start in the bathroom. I realised I was starting to get a bit caught up in the details, mould on the ceiling, stains on the floor etc. All squats would have started out clean and freshly decorated and so should this one! I took the house apart again, painted the bathroom walls and then went online and found some printable wallpapers, floor and tile patterns (www.jennifersprintables.com) shrank and printed some out and, after measuring everything about a hundred times, cut out what I needed and glued them in place.
In-between waiting for things to dry I cut out some squares of clear plastic from some packaging I had been keeping for just such an occasion and stuck them behind the windows. For one of the bedroom windows I cut a jagged shape out of the plastic to look like a brick had gone through it.
At this point I also remembered how much it annoys me when dolls houses/dioramas don't have stairs so made some. I used the offcut bits of wood pushed out from the windows and some cut up toothpicks. Once again I measured everything a thousand times and drilled some tiny holes into the steps to stick bits of toothpick into so they'd be more secure.
I got pretty excited at how well they had gone together and did a little happy dance before going back to wallpapering.
*A little tip I've worked out from making miniatures- a big lump of blue tack is great for balancing things in place while the glue dries!
And here's the decorated bathroom! The model had a door leading to the outside balcony and I did block this off reusing the original push out piece of wood.
Then I had to wait for my next free day to work on it some more so I'm going to make you wait too! (Or you can just move on to the next post if it's already finished and up by the time you are reading this...)
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