Homemade Barbie House

I hope all of you had a very merry Christmas! Ours was filled with fun, family, gifts and of course, food.  I know, I haven't posted hardly any of the delicious treats and meals I've made, but there's a good reason for it.  I've spent the last few weeks building a Barbie house for my girls.  Let me tell you, it was no small undertaking.  I have nearly 100 hours into it, and I didn't get it completely finished.

Normally, I'm not much of a crafty person.  I don't have the creativity or vision, not to mention the patience, to make something out of nothing.  But this year, I didn't have a lot of choice.  This year was a lean Christmas.  We didn't have the resources to buy what my kiddos wanted, so I made a lot of it.  I can't pass off homemade gifts on my older teenage kids.  It just wouldn't fly.  You can't be cool using something your mom made and there's no way under heaven I could have pulled of a passable guitar, saxophone case or long board.  Its just beyond my skill.  ;P  But somehow, I managed the Barbie house.

I got the structure of the house from a dear friend that made it for her girls about 12 years ago.  She was building a new one for her grand kids and wanted to get rid of the old one.  It ended up being a godsend for me.

So off I went to Home Depot for supplies.  I really thought this was going to be a pretty hard project, but it wasn't.  It was just time consuming.  I had to strip the frame down to the bare bones and my fabulous hubby built a balcony on the house complete with spindles and columns.  (Did I mention that he's amazing?)  Then a few coats of paint and it looked almost like new!

To decorate the rooms, I had my dear friend Amy help me Modge Podge scrapbook paper on the walls.  It was easy and cheap.  In fact, it took longer to choose the paper we wanted to use than it did to put it on the walls.  There are so many great patterns and colors of scrapbook paper that you're only limited by your imagination.

Isn't that the cutest little hand sneaking into the picture.  That's my Boey!

One of the most time consuming parts of the whole project was building the furniture.  I built 2 sets of bunk beds with comforters (which was probably overkill, but with 4 girls sharing the house I would rather be safe than sorry!), a larger bed for the master bedroom, a coffee table, an ottoman, painted dressers, towel rack and china rack, fridge, stove, kitchen counters, dining table and chairs, bathroom vanity and couch and love seat.  It was a lot of work and I didn't quite finish everything, but I gave them everything I could on Christmas.  The rest I'll finish up this week and sneak in later.  I'd still love to make a crib and a porch swing.  Just not right now.

I can tell you that even though this project consumed my December the look on my girls' faces on Christmas morning was worth every minute of my time.  They didn't even want to open the rest of the presents.  They would have been happy if they hadn't received anything but a second hand Barbie house.  For me it was a labor of love with rewards that are out of this world!

The glue on the couch hadn't quite dried yet!