New beginnings

Anyone who follows my blogs will know that I have already made (and part-made) several one twelfth 'dolls houses'.  I abandoned the hobby last summer as I live in a smallish house and don't have room for more than one project.  Each one took about six months to complete and then I found I wanted another - the pleasure, for me, seems to be in the 'doing'.  I felt guilty each time I sold on (or gave away) one of these houses because I had spent a lot of money on it and had no way to recoup so much as a quarter of it.  It didn't seem to be a sensible hobby to choose.

I decided to quit twelfths and ventured into quarter scale (1/48ths, 1:4, 1/4 inch) so I could create and then keep my creations.  I didn't get very far in by the time I decided it wasn't for me.  I get enormous pleasure from trying to replicate real life as closely as possible and quarter scale demands a level of impressionism which, although very clever, didn't seem to satisfy me.

So here I am - back in the game with Dalton House......  well almost.... I am awaiting its arrival.

Dalton House

It is a kit called Dalton House (right now I can't think of a name I like better) from Dolls House Direct.  They do have a website but really they sell via their EBay shop, so you would do better to use this link and find them there.  They also offer an eclectic mix of things for your hobby - I have found a few nuggets that I shall be going back for some time.

House without the basement

The house and basement will give me ten rooms and a couple of hallways to go at.  My original theory was that I would buy a huge project with something like fifteen plus rooms and it would become a lifetime, one purchase kit.  After a bit of a cooling off period I worried about maybe (again) abandoning something that would have cost me £700 upwards and I also knew that if I were working on something that size I would have to spread my 'spends' far and wide and therefore always be frugal in my purchases.

Since being in this game I have craved the 'nice' things I see, but didn't buy because I knew their time with me was limited. I gave it a lot of thinking about and decided to go for a middling size property so I can do my best to go at it slowly and wait until I can afford each next step and buy (pretty much) what I want without being concerned that at some stage it is going to be 'binned' to make room for the next one.

My relieving-my-guilt analogy is, that if I did something like played golf as a hobby, I would be spending thousands over the years and have nothing to show for it, so.......

Tweaking

You may have noticed in the two photos above this one that the house has windows on the side.  I am having mine made without those.  They are cute for a dolls house; they let in extra light and  it looks nice from the side and are good to peak through to see what's going on.  As I said, I like it to be as real as possible so my London town house would be in a terrace of similar houses and therefore, no side windows.

I have a lot of thoughts buzzing around right now as to how to tweak the front slice of a property to give the impression of more going on behind, how to give servants access to each floor, and a million other 'problems'.  This isn't a bad thing - solving the 'problems' is half the fun.

At this stage all we need to know is that the 'box' is on its way ready for a bit of kit-bashing after its first dry build.

I did find several pretty much identical real houses but generally they were larger and grander than mine.  Mine has a decidedly town setting about it, especially with that sort of basement/pavement arrangement.  Also the rooms are not huge so it needs to be a fairly modest home.

There is a multitude of 'cliché' Georgian houses to choose from for inspiration and like any house in any century all of them can have their own quirks.  I am tempted by the warm paint tones of this one but I need to do more research and I think in London these Georgian houses were brick built and then by full-blown Regency period they were stuccoed and painted white.  

So while I am waiting for its physical presence I am back to another aspect that I enjoy and that's the historical research and 1820 is not a period I know well.  Thank heavens for Jane Austen!