Definitely shutters, if only I could show you!

So much has happened since I last posted about my dolls houses, I don't know where to start!

In early December, I went to a conference in Newcastle, in New South Wales, for work. As Christine Jaeger lives near Newcastle, that gave us a chance to meet - for the first time, though it certainly didn't feel like it! I had a wonderful evening looking at all her dolls houses, furnishings and dolls, and we persuaded her husband Max to take a photo of us - here we are standing in front of her Princess house:

At the conference, a friend mentioned that he would be driving from Sydney through Bathurst the following weekend, and he offered transport if I had anything to go to Bathurst. I didn't exactly - but I had been thinking about a dolls house listed on Gumtree, that was in Ashfield, in Sydney .... things worked out, and the Ashfield dolls house is now mine, and in Bathurst!

What hasn't worked out is the photos of the front of the house, which I know I took while I was in Bathurst in January. (Being a Gumtree listing, it has now disappeared from the interwebs.) The front of the house has a central porch, with a false front door (which doesn't open), and false windows which all have opening shutters. That is probably hard to imagine, but unfortunately, photos will have to wait until I am next in Bathurst.

UPDATE: The friend who collected the dolls house from Ashfield and delivered it to Bathurst also very cleverly saved a photo from Google's cache soon afterwards. Thank you! Here is a thumbnail of one of the photos in the Gumtree listing:

The photos I do have show the paint stripping I did to reveal the original colours. It is currently painted dark brown on the porch, shutters and roof, and the exterior walls are white. The roof was originally green, scored to simulate tiles:

 

 

This is the back of the roof, where I started the stripping. I'll probably have to repaint it green - or at least even out the scrape marks. In the top right of the photo, you can see the base of one of the two chimneys. The other chimney is on the back left of the house:

The walls were originally painted a lovely honey colour:

Inside, there are four rooms. The top two were painted pink and apricot - a bit of stripping shows that the pink room was originally apricot too:

Here you can see the top left room, with the doorway through into the top right room. All the rooms have skirting boards, architraves around the doorways, and picture rails. There's no evidence of any doors. The wood trim was originally dark brown, as you can see here:

(After I took this photo, and realised that the apricot paint goes over the white paint on the architrave, I removed a wee bit and found that it's painted over earlier apricot paint. So both upper rooms were originally painted apricot.)

Above the picture rail is a buff colour under the white:

Downstairs, both rooms are painted a greeny blue colour. I don't have a good photo of that - that also seems to have disappeared with the photos of the front of the house. You can just see a bit of the blue in this photo of the kitchen floor:

This is the only room with interesting flooring - textured paper of some kind, I think (which has been overpainted with white, and then had something stuck over that, by the looks of it).

The other floors seem just to have brown paper. At first I thought it had the kind of spatter and smear pattern that some lino tiles had in the 40s and 50s, but I think it is actually paint spatter, smeared by being wiped off, from when the roof was painted brown:

 You can see in this photo that the ground floor doorway is set further back than the upper doorway.

The white paint splashed messily on the wood trim, and spreading on to the walls, was presumably applied at some point when the walls were wallpapered. There were some remnants of paper which I have removed - none with any pattern remaining, just the back of some wallpaper. I also started removing the white paint from the walls - I will strip them back to apricot upstairs, and greeny blue downstairs, with brown wood trim and buff above the picture rail. I may find a similar paper for the kitchen, but will probably find rugs or carpet for the other rooms. Outside, I will strip it back to the lovely honey colour with a green roof and green trim on the windows, shutters and porch.

I'm so annoyed that I don't have a photo to show you of the front, as it's much the most interesting part of the dolls house! I don't know who made this house, or when. It does have some resemblances to the dolls houses shown in Walther & Stevenson catalogues - the line of the porch, and the style of the chimneys - but that may be coincidence. It is very well made, suggesting either a skilled home maker, or a commercially made house. The colours suggest the 1930s or 40s to me, but it could be from the 1950s, I suppose.

While I was in Bathurst, I also cleaned several houses by Bestoys, and another one by Woodtoys - I do have photos of them, and will show them in my next posts!

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!