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Assembling the
Dollhouse
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| Click on
photograph to enlarge |
| Assembling the dollhouse is a very
long and complicated endeavor. Every action has to be done in a
certain order because, once the house is all put together,
certain places can no longer be reached and some things
would become impossible to accomplish. A good example of this are the
closets that hold china and glassware. You need to approach them from
the front in order to load them neatly and, even then, you need to do
most of
the work using tweezers and a great deal of patience. Because the shelf
heights are in scale, it is easier for a child with small hands to do
some of the work in narrow places where an adult hand will simply not
fit easily. When the house was first assembled in Michigan, it took Eve three days to get everything into the cabinets and drawers. But when the house was moved upstairs into Rachel's room several months later, she was on hand to do a lot of the work and we were able to do it in one very long day instead of three. In this photograph, Rachel and Eve are filling the kitchen cabinets. Much of the work has to be done using a small mirror on a long handle to make sure that everything is lining up correctly. |
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| This photo shows the wires coming up through the chimney flue between the kitchen and the dining room walls. The wires all have to be threaded up through the second storey flue and into the attic space as the second floor is being lowered onto the first. Because the dollhouse is so heavy, it requires several strong men to hold the second floor steady while the wires are being captured and drawn up to the next level. They have to be completely drawn up before the second floor can be lowered and allowed to rest on the first. Care also has to be taken so that the ceiling fixtures for the first storey, which are attached to the bottom of the second storey (the bottom of which is actually the first storey's ceilings) do not get broken off or unplugged because it is very difficult to get the very thin pins into the tiny receptacles if you can not get close enough to see the alignment of the wire prongs. |
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| Here the living rooms are complete but other areas still need work. |
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| In this photograph you can see the relative size of the pair of tweezers on the floor and the colander of green beans set on the floor. The beans were made by Ginger Graham, a woman of enormous patience as well as a very steady hand. |
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| The dining room table is now set. However, a moment later, one of the wires was unintentionally moved and it all had to be done again. Our daughter, Elizabeth, reached in to adjust something on the dining room sideboard while Eve's hand can be seen holding the kitchen door open. |
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| Here Rachel and her grandmother are almost ready to call the men in to put the second floor in place. |
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