No more stripping done

Well, tomorrow I go to Sydney for a few days on my way back to Darwin. I've unpacked quite a lot of my sister's boxes in our real-life house - I didn't get any more paint stripping done on this dolls house, though. However, I had brought with me a couple of rugs I acquired on ebay, and another set of Walther & Stevenson dolls house furniture, so I had a play with furnishing the house.

I was delighted to spot a set of Walther & Stevenson dolls house furniture on UK ebay late last year - I wonder how it got to England from Sydney? In the set were some pieces I already had, and many I didn't, including the lounge suite and the radio shown in the photo above.

There was also a grandfather (or grandmother?) clock (missing the clock face) and a hall stand (missing the mirror) in the set from England. (The pink table here is made from lids from jars, nailed to a wooden cotton reel - it came with this house, but I forgot to photograph it last time.)

The blue kitchen set came with this house, too - these photos will help remind me what I have, and what I still need in this house. (I have bought another rug for this room, but it hasn't arrived yet.)

The most exciting part of the UK ebay lot was this Walther & Stevenson bathroom! I was absolutely delighted to get it, even though the toilet is missing a bit, and the boiler (chip heater?) doesn't have its shower head - I can probably make one from a bit of wire.

There was another bedroom set, too:

For some reason, all the mirrors in this lot are missing, so I shall have to try to find replacements ... The door of the larger wardrobe doesn't hang properly, either.

With the pink and blue bedroom sets which came with this house, I can now have three bedrooms.

I have added a few of the other pieces that came with this house - the rug in the bathroom, a cushion, pillows and mattress, a hairbrush, and two of the dolls. A lot of the other items that came with it are more recent, or, like the felt carpeting and a matchbox lounge suite, in poor condition. I may use some of the felt, and I'll keep the matchbox furniture, but now I have the Walther & Stevenson lounge suite, I will use that instead.

So I have lots more paint stripping to do on future visits to Bathurst! In the meantime, I'll be keeping an eye out for more rugs, and looking through my stash for bedding, dolls, kitchen accessories, etc.

Happy New Year!

Where did the last four months of 2013 go? I don't know - I guess I was busy at work, and I did get two online magazines out on Dolls Houses Past and Present, but my intentions to write more blog posts came to nothing.
I'm now on my summer holiday, and I'm staying with my sister in Bathurst, NSW. She moved here just before Christmas, to live in the house our mother left us. I've been helping her unpack boxes, especially boxes of books.
I've also started stripping paint from the wallpaper in the antique book-style house from Sydney, which I showed in May last year.

The wall on the left was covered with the same pink paint as the back wall. (The lower right corner is the last bit I did on that wall - it's darker because it's still a bit damp from the stripper.)

The stripped wallpaper has lost some of the colour and detail of the original papers in the rooms below, but looks much better than solid pink!

I also took off some of the paint from the floor of the room below, as I wanted to reveal more of the writing stamped on the wood:

I think it says Bruto 59, though I'm not sure about the last letter.

 

And just before I stopped, because the sun was moving round to the spot in the garden where I was working, I put some paint stripper on a corner of the roof. It removed the top layer of pink - I think there's another layer of red underneath the blue:

I don't know how much more stripping I'll get done while I'm here - I have another week, before I spend a few days in Sydney and then fly back to Darwin. I'm hoping I'll get this room finished, at least.

I also have four new dolls houses occupying my bedroom here, so I'm hoping to get a headstart on blogging and show them to you while I'm here! (Actually, there are five, counting a cardboard flatpack dolls house!)

I hope you have all had a happy Christmas, and wish you all a safe, healthy, happy and prosperous year ahead, with lots of dolls house fun!

Another "book" house, this time from Sydney

I have posted about one of the dolls houses I picked up from Anna-Maria in Canberra. My sister in Sydney was also holding a dolls house for me - here it is on her spare bed, waiting for me:

This was listed on ebay as a "Gorgeous Vintage Wooden Children's Dolls House'. It was in western Sydney (near Penrith). The house is indeed gorgeous - or could be again - and I was especially excited to see that it came with lots of furniture which I can now recognise as from Walther & Stevenson!

This house is 18 1/2 inches wide, 2 feet tall to the top of the chimney, and 16 1/2 inches deep when closed (so the rooms are about 8 inches deep). The front "door", which doesn't open, is about 6" high to the top of the arched fanlight.

What looks like the front of the house is actually one of the side walls - the house opens in half, like a book, on the chimney side. The house I bought last year from Melbourne also opens like a book, though the chimney is at the other end on that one.

The end of the house with the hinges:

 The house seems to have had several generations of play, going by the layers of paint on it. Under the pink on the roof, there are traces of blue, and under that red:

And on the door and window frames, there's a layer of pink on top of blue again, and under that traces of green:

As you can see, there's some wonderful wallpaper inside:

The lower left room

The lower right room even has beautiful paper on the ceiling:

There's paper on the ceiling of the lower left room, but it has been painted over:

All the upstairs room have been painted pink, over the top of the wallpaper:

Can you see the texture of the wallpaper, and the strips around the windows and along the top of the walls? I'll get some paint stripper, and try to remove the paint from the wallpaper - if it's like the downstairs wallpaper, it will definitely be worth trying to save ...

It looks like there were pictures stuck onto the wallpaper, which were lifted before the wallpaper was painted over, and then stuck back down on the paint. Unfortunately, one of the pictures has torn (and so did the wallpaper it was stuck to):

Some of the dirty felt that came with the house as carpeting 

Most of the windows on this side of the house are broken - not sure how easy it will be to fix them.

I'll show the furniture that came with this house in my next post. Most of the furniture appears in catalogues of the Sydney toy store Walther & Stevenson. Maybe the house was bought from there too? I haven't yet seen it in a catalogue, but as I've only seen four catalogues, and one catalogue specifically states that they have dolls houses in styles other than those pictured, it certainly seems possible.

Whoever made it, they thriftily recycled a packing case. Here's the base:

It appears to say 'Magnetically clea[ned] by [W]alker & [G]reig Proc[....]'. I wonder what was in it?

A new dolls house

I don't know if you'll remember the scans I showed last year, from the very grandly named The Australian, New Zealand & Southern Equatorial Sportsgoods & Toy & Canvasgoods Retailer? The April 1953 issue has a full-page advertisement for a shop called "Elegant" Novelties, in Flinders Lane, Melbourne:

On the top shelf, at the back, are two dolls houses:

You can imagine my excitement when I saw the larger house on ebay earlier this year! Thanks to some friends of my sister's, who collected the house from the seller, I was able to get it freighted up to Darwin, and I picked it up on Monday!

I can't tell from the ad what colours the exterior was painted, but it has definitely been repainted. I can see tiny bits of red under the black paint on the window frames, and there is some green showing through the black paint on the central diamond shape. I don't think I'll try removing the black paint - I never get finished with exterior restorations, and I quite like the black as it is!

It's a book-style dolls house - it's hinged at the back, and both sides swing open, showing five rooms inside.  When I got it, it has bright red sticky-backed plastic (contact / fablon) on all the floors. That came off very easily, but has left a sticky residue. I just checked on Dolls Houses Past and Present, and someone had success using white spirit (methylated spirits?), so I might give that a go. I don't want to use eucalyptus oil, which is excellent for removing adhesive residue, because I think it might damage the flooring.

 I think I'll use this room as the bedroom.

Each room has different flooring. I'm not sure exactly what it is - an earlier version of contact/fablon? oilcloth? Lovely period designs, anyway! The walls are quite simply decorated - painted in a base colour, and then spattered with red paint - very simple and effective!

 This will probably be the living room.

This is the only room which had been repapered. Luckily it wasn't stuck down very hard - the main glue residue is on the front edges. The curtains are not original in any rooms - in this room, they were stapled in over the recent wallpaper.

This flooring looks good for the kitchen to me!

Two smaller rooms - the tiled floor suggests a bathroom, 

and perhaps the other room was intended as a laundry?

This photo finally shows the fireplaces! They are cut in each large room, at the inside front edge. Behind the walls at this point are planks of wood to which the hinges are attached - I'll take a photo of the back of the house so you can see that, and another of the fireplaces.
In this photo you can also see some recently applied wallpaper borders. I will remove this - the paper itself will come off easily, but there will be glue residue, so I haven't ripped it off straight away, having just spent some time removing the residue left by the glue under the wallpaper in the top right room.

I'm delighted to have this house, which is unique among my Australian houses in that I know exactly when and where it came from! I don't know who made it, but without the ad for Elegant Novelties, I might well have thought this was another homemade house, and wouldn't have been so sure of its age. (Of course, they were probably made in other years as well as 1953 - maybe sometime I'll be able to go through more issues of the Australian (etc) Toy (etc) Retailer, and see if it appears again.

The furniture that came with it was mostly quite recent tab and slot stuff, which I won't be keeping. I'm looking forward to going through my stash of furnishings and seeing what suits it. First, though, I have to work out where on earth - or rather, in my small townhouse - I am going to put it? I have too many dolls houses - or my house is too small, whichever way you want to look at it!