Super Hero Lair - the beginning.

The other week I took my six year old nephew to school and stayed for a while so he could show me all his artwork and writing on the walls and wires.  His letter to Santa caught my eye.  Naturally he wanted an iPhone and charger and more Lego, but he also wanted a house for a superhero.  I think that came about because of his sister getting a dollhouse.


So I started putting my thinking cap on.  How could I do this for him....

I went to The Warehouse and looked at bookcases.  I decided the best one to get was one that normally had three spaces in it.  At $15 for one of these bookcases I would be a fool not to use them.  However, an action figure like the ones my nephew has would be too tall for the space.  So my brother helped my drill holes at the half-way mark and we put the shelf together with two bigger spaces.

I accidentally put the back on the wrong way round.  But that actually worked to my advantage.  I wanted to paper the back wall in a different colour to mitigate the blackness of the shelf itself and the paper would glue better to the wood side of the back panel, with a bit of a rub with some sandpaper first, rather than the shiny black laminate.

I went through my scrapbooking paper and this was the one piece I felt I c ould use with a superhero.  I had two pages of it.

I used the shelf that we didn't put into the bookcase as the guide for how wide I needed to trim the paper.  The paper was not tall enough, so I had to use part of the second paper to finished the first wall.  I did not have enough paper to complete the back wall in the lower section.

I decided to decorate the walls left and right with maps and pictures of superheroes.  So I cruised through the net and found these pictures, printed them out, cut them out and glued them on.

The next step would be to finished the back wall of the lower section, do the floors and make some furniture.  That would be another blog post.

Getting ready to paint the Dollhouse.

The old Dollhouse is looking a bit dated.  So I decided it needed freshening up with a new coat of paint... and colours that were a bit more girly.  I'm personally not a fan of pink, and since pretty much every Barbie item is pink, I wanted to avoid painting the house pink.

So off I went to Mitre 10 Mega where a lovely lady talked me through paint options and set me up with some sandpaper too.

And this is the house after a touch of sandpapering and a rubdown with a cloth.

The colours I choose were Sky Blue and Lilac Pink from the Small Job range at Mitre 10 Mega.  I choose these colours because they were girly but not pink, they will tone down the pink of Barbie accessories, I like these colours, they won't dominate Bella's room and will tone in with other colours in her room.  These photos show the paint before and after stirring.

Isn't it amazing what a good stir does to change the colour from first opening the lid up!

And then I started the painting.  But that is for my next post.  :-)