My husband and I decided to make Abigail a doll house. I started to research plans, the first place I went was ana-white.com which is my favorite furniture builder ever (Fan girl moment). I had already used several of her easy to follow plans on various other projects, my favorite being these amazing 8 foot picture ledges.
Can you believe these only cost about $10 to make?! You can find build plans for these shelves and the doll house I'm about to show you here: www.ana-white.com
We wanted a doll house that could be used for any of Abigail's toys, from the 18 inch dolls down to the littlest toy figurines. We choose to go with the three story 18 inch doll house plans, like this one here.
With our house being on the smaller size, we wanted to modify the plans a little to allow it to fit better in our home. We choose to only include two stories. Don't let the pictures fool you, even without the third story this house is massive. An American Girl doll can be played inside the rooms with lots of space for furniture. Our house ended up being about 4 feet wide, a tad bit over 4 feet tall, and 2 feet deep. It's huge, so huge my daughter enjoys playing inside it as well.
We don't own a jigsaw, so we took turns doing this for every window and door. We first drilled holes in each corner and then sawed(yes, that's a drywall saw. Don't be like us) across the lines. I highly recommend getting the right tools for the job, but we sure do get a good chuckle out of building this project.
We used 3/4 inch plywood for this build. If I had to do it over again I would follow the original plans and get the 1/4 inch plywood for the backing because this thing is heavy. But we didn't want to buy the extra board. We also went with a different roof style. Assembly was easy using my Kreg Jig.
I love how secure pocket holes and wood glue are together. And the best part is it's fast and easy! After assembling all the pieces together, I painted the whole thing with left over paint. The original plans has lovely trimmed windows and casters, we will be adding them at a later date.
