Build Your Own Dollhouse in One Day

Many little girls dream of owning their own dollhouse, complete with furniture, home decor, and a sweet little family to live inside. Store-bought dollhouses can cost hundreds of dollars and may require laborious piecing together, and even painting, sanding and hammering.

Instead of buying a dollhouse, why not make one together with your little girl? It doesn't have to be complicated or take a long time. You can build your own dollhouse in just one day.

Materials Needed

1. Various small boxes: shoeboxes, cereal boxes, etc.

2. Sturdy tape or glue

3. Paint

4. Styrofoam blocks and shapes

5. Felt fabric

6. Needle and thread or craft glue

7. Scraps, buttons, anything to decorate with

Building the Dollhouse

Building the dollhouse itself is the first task to undertake. Gather together a good selection of small size cardboard boxes and cut them so that they are all the same depth. A good depth for the dollhouse is about 3 or 4 inches: the average depth of a shoebox.

Arrange them into a large square or rectangle. Each box will represent one room in the dollhouse. The outside of the dollhouse should be a regular shape so the whole thing looks better.

Once you have all of your rooms arranged, you should attach them all to each other with glue or sturdy tape. At this point, you can also paint the outside of the house, or the inside of each room if you wish.

To make it look more like an actual house, you can add a cardboard roof angle, cut out windows in the back wall, or even build cardboard stairs going from one room to a higher one.

Creating Furniture

After you have your dollhouse complete, you need to furnish it with items your dolls will need. Making simple furniture is easy with Styrofoam blocks of various sizes and felt fabric. Simply stitch or glue the felt onto the Styrofoam shapes to make couches, chairs, tables, beds and more. To make your furniture more realistic, you can even stitch patterns onto the couches, or sew beads or buttons on for faux drawer pulls.