Ever since I discovered the book Miss Happiness and Miss Flower by Rumer Godden, I have wanted a Japanese dollhouse. I started searching online, but it turns out there are no kits for building houses, and antique models come up very rarely and carry hefty price tags. I discovered a flicker photostream of someone restoring a beautiful vintage Japanese machida-style house, and the pictures were so many and so detailed that I started thinking I could build my own.
I started from scratch at first, but was struggling due to my lack of the appropriate wood working tools. Slowly, over time, I started accumulating various dremel bits and saws that will enable me to complete my project. In the mean time though, I was lucky enough one day to stumble across an old handmade house that someone was selling locally on Facebook.
I started from scratch at first, but was struggling due to my lack of the appropriate wood working tools. Slowly, over time, I started accumulating various dremel bits and saws that will enable me to complete my project. In the mean time though, I was lucky enough one day to stumble across an old handmade house that someone was selling locally on Facebook.
Through my artistic vision, I saw this thing as the perfect frame for a single-story Japanese country house. I picked it up for $20 and set to work immediately. The first thing that had to go was the outer wall with the doors and windows. I thought I would need the dremel, but in the end I simply tapped it out with a hammer.
I used a bamboo dish drying rack which I happened to have for the roof frame and for the wall section across the front of the house, above the Shoji doors. The roof is hinged at the peak, so it can be lifted up and down to get at the upstairs rooms. I glued two very small strips of wood side by side, about a quarter inch apart, across the bottom of that front bamboo wall panel, and across the edge of the floor at the front of the house to create a track for the sliding shoji.
The shoji doors were laser-cut dollhouse miniatures purchased off eBay from Japan. They were somewhat pricey, but I had already ran into difficulties in making my own shoji from my initial attempts (I did finally come up with a technique- more on that later).
I'm not sure yet what I want to do for the roof. Since this is a country house, it seems that thatch would be appropriate and for that I have in mind some tiki-hut thatching which comes in long strips and can be purchased on Amazon fairly inexpensively. Alternately, I got a roll of 48" by 25' of black corrugated paper, which could be used to simulate tile roofing...will probably do that part last and see which I like best.
Miss Happiness and Miss Flower?
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