My House History

I got my first dollhouse for Christmas when I was four. It was huge, handmade, and fully furnished.

It was absolutely perfect for about two months. Then my baby brother started to move around a lot, decided that breaking things is fun, and you can guess the rest.

A few years later we moved, and there was nowhere to put the dollhouse. (Or so my parents said. The bedrooms in that house were generously sized, so I've long suspected they left it in the garage because my brother had done so much damage that it no longer looked presentable. To be fair, though, it was over four feet long, at least two feet high, and since it was made of real wood, it was also very heavy.)

I was eventually given a pink plastic Maple Town dollhouse, which I liked, but it wasn't the same (plus, it was too small and out-of-scale to hold the surviving furniture). Like a lot of little girls, I occasionally made my own little houses and furnishings out of discarded boxes and whatever odds and ends I could find. Again...it just wasn't the same.

When my tenth birthday approached, I begged my parents for a new dollhouse. They said yes.

My dad finally finished it three and a half years later.

I was so happy to finally have that house, but there were always things about it that annoyed me. I hated the bulky gingerbread trim (I'd asked Dad to leave it off, but he forgot). There were gaps, there were a couple of unevenly glued walls jutting out at odd angles, the wallpaper wouldn't stay down, and I never liked the sage green carpet (it was the only color the craft store had). After college, I discovered that the house had sustained some damage from being stored, uncovered, in a garage. I tried making it over, but couldn't get it quite right. When I had to drastically downsize my possessions and move into a tiny apartment, I gave the house and most of the furniture to a struggling family with a young daughter whose birthday was coming up. I have no regrets about that (and I'm told she was thrilled).

Since then, I've done several room boxes, but haven't gotten around to a proper house. That's finally going to change.