You can make a beautiful dollhouse out of papier-mâché. A great community activity for the whole family. The advantage is that the dollhouse costs you almost nothing.
What you need:
- 6 milk cartons
- adhesive
- clear coat
- newsprint
- wallpaper paste
- plywood panel
- colour
- Egg carton
- Cutter
- scissors
Basic construction of the papier-mâché dollhouse
To make a papier-mâché dollhouse, you first need a framework to which you apply papier-mâché:
- Collect the 6 boxes of milk packaging in the supermarket, these have a base area of 36 x 19 cm and are 21 cm high. Use the boxes in such a way that they are on the long side, this results in a room with a floor area of 36 x 21 cm, in real life at 1:12 that would be 4.32 m by 2.50 m, the 19 cm is then the room height , which corresponds to a room height of 2.28 m in real life.
- You need 4 boxes, of which you put together 2 each with the original bases and place these two double boxes next to each other. You get a house that consists of four rooms, 2 of which can be reached from the front and 2 from the back.
- Seal the open, smaller sides of the cartons with pieces of cardboard that you cut out of the surplus milk cartons.
- Think about where room doors should go and cut them out with a cutter.
- Now glue the boxes with the back and side walls together.
- To prevent the papier-mâché from soaking through the boxes, coat everything inside and out twice with clear varnish.
Stabilization of the cardboard dollhouse
- Once the paint is dry, tape 10×10 cm pieces of newspaper to the inside and outside of the boxes. You need 5 to 6 layers. Each layer should always be dry before applying the next so that the cardboard does not become soggy.
- Soak approx. 1×1 cm pieces of newspaper in wallpaper paste. It should be a thick porridge. It takes 2-3 days for the mass to be well soaked.
- Cut out small pieces of egg carton that will later decorate the walls as stones.
- Plaster the inside and outside of the dollhouse with this papier-mâché compound. Smooth the inside out and press the bricks out of the egg cartons into the papier-mâché on the outside.
- Paint the interior walls and exterior with paint. Remains of emulsion paint left over from a renovation or small test tins of such paint that are available in hardware stores are very suitable for this.
- Place either a sheet of plywood on top of the finished dollhouse that is big enough to overhang 5 cm everywhere, or take 2 sheets that you put together at an acute angle and put on as a gable roof.
If you like, you can add another layer of cardboard to the papier-mâché dollhouse.
