How to Make a Doll’s House with Grandkids

So you and your grandkids made clothespin dolls from last week’s post, and you’ve exhausted the play. It’s time to take the next step: make a doll’s house!

While designed for our clothespin dolls, this house can be home to other small dolls.

This is a fun project to do with grandchildren in person, if you can. But if you’re still distancing, as we are, or if you live too far away to visit, simply do this project via FaceTime, zoom, or another remote meeting app.

Materials for the Doll’s House

The materials will depend on what you and your grandchild can find around the house and your imagination to convert everyday items into furnishings. Basically, what you’ll need:

• Box with lid, such as a shoe box
• Additional boxes to make more rooms, as desired
• Smaller boxes to turn into furniture
• Printed paper or cardstock (for wallpaper and floors)
• Glue stick
• White glue, such as Elmer’s
• Low-temperature mini glue gun
• Scissors
• Assorted bits that you can turn into lamps, furniture, and household accessories

While I usually put together a kit of materials for the child when we do a project remotely, this time, we each did our own household scrounging. I just provided the printed cardstock for the walls and floor.

How to Make a Doll’s House

For the exterior: Stand the shoebox on its side and lay it inside the upturned cover of the shoe box so the shoe box lid can become the floor of your house.

If you are making more rooms, use different size boxes according to need, such as a narrower box for a powder room.

More fun with cardboard: make a walk-in house for your child.

Decorate the walls and floor. I used patterned paper for the walls. I found, in my cardstock stash, that I had cardstock that looked like wood to use for the living room floor and some that looked like tile for the powder room. You could also leave the walls and floor plain or paint with poster paints or acrylic paint.

How to Make Furniture

Now to furnish your house! Here are some ideas:

• Beds–small boxes or make your own from cardstock. I used the Martha Stewart Crafts Scoring Board to make the boxes/beds.
• Chest of drawers–small jewelry box standing upright. To make drawers, cut cardstock the same size as the box lid, fold a few times to crease and form “drawers” and glue on hole punch circles for drawer pulls.
• Table–the plastic “table” from pizza deliveries.
• Stool–Champagne cork with fabric circle glued on top for the cushion. I used a scrap of fake fur.
• Round table–empty spoon from a roll of fancy ribbon.
• Reclining chair–a metal whistle. This clever chair idea is from the book, More Curious Jane: Science + Design + Engineering for Inquisitive Girls.

• Additional furniture–fashion with bits of corrugated cardboard (from all those Amazon packages). Miss T came up with the idea for a bookshelf on her own and made it by cutting and taping together cardboard pieces.
• Lamp–crayon planted in an empty spool of thread with pill bottle cap hot-glued to the crayon for the lampshade. Bonus points: glue a bit of chain to make a lamp pull and cover the spool with washi tape.
• Toilet–bottle cap from a large vitamin pill bottle, such as Kirkland, set on a cut-down cardboard toilet paper roll.
• Sink–cap snipped from a dental floss container, such as Glide, glued to a large spool.

How to Make Accessories

Accessories add the finishing touch to your house.

• Color Pencils–toothpicks. This one is genius and another idea from the More Curious Jane book. Cut toothpicks in half (double-sided ones that are cylindrical, not flat, and use markers to paint the tips of the “pencils” and the sides, leaving some wood showing between the two ends. Arrange in a glue stick cap.
• Mirror–tin lid, such as from a canister of tea.
• Vase–wooden bead with a flat bottom. Hot glue into the hole and insert a few artificial flowers.
• Cosmetic Bottles–colored beads with flat bases. Great accessory for the mirror ledge in the powder room.
• Toilet paper roll–rolled-up strip of toilet paper or paper towel; add a dab of white glue to keep the roll in place.
• Books–folded cardstock. Cut white foam core board to make the pages and hot glue to the spine. Cut out type for book titles from a magazine or a discarded book.
• Pictures–sandwich a piece of art between acetate and cardboard and hold together with washi tape along all sides, making the picture frame.

What Kids Learn from this Project:

Making a doll’s house is a fun project to do with your grandchild; a bonding experience, especially if you’re social distancing; and a way to enrich a child’s life.

• This is a wonderful catalyst to spur imagination. Kids will start looking around at everyday items, trying to see if they might be transformed into something useful for their doll’s house.
• Kids will use their creativity in playing with their dolls and dollhouse, concocting stories.
• Logic comes to play as they decide how to arrange a room with furniture, determining what the dolls need for daily living, and accommodating those needs through furnishings they make.
• Kids will continue to perfect fine motor skills as they craft furniture and work with small items to place in the dollhouse.

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