Two or three months before my granddaughter’s birthday, I started thinking about a nice present for her. She was always talking about a dollhouse during the short trips back home from school. So I decided to make her a surprise and build her a dollhouse from scratch.

Supplies

12 square wood hardboards with 39cm x 37 cm

1 right angle stick for the roof hips

White glue

Step 1: Gathering the Materials...

So I started looking for some material I might have to make it.

And I found several squares of wood hardboard. The measured around 39 x 37 so I decided I had enough boards to make the house.

I made some indentations so they could form a type of cross by interconnecting them. Then I put them together with one for the bottom, one for the top and two other boards for lateral walls. This way they would form eight different rooms, two downstairs and two upstairs on each side.

Then I decided that it had to have a roof because as it was, it didn’t look nice. As the house was practically a cube, the roof had to be a pyramid hip roof.

Then I realized that I hadn´t made any doors between the different rooms, so I took it apart again and cut the doors between all the different spaces.

It looked much better now!

Step 2: Painting and Preparing the Gift!

Then I painted the exterior walls white and the roof red.

And it was finished a week before my granddaughter's birthday. I bought a large cardboard box and gave it to her for her birthday.

She loved it and from then on all her playing was around the house. But I noticed that it had a problem: the rooms were too dark to play in the evening because they were full of shadows and I hadn’t thought of illumination.

Step 3: Illumination!

So I asked for her permission to take it back in order to create a system to make it bright with lights. I bought some led tapes, wire and I invented a system so that there would be independent lighting in each room of the house: 8 in total.

So I bought a small wood box, small switches used in electronics and using my soldering iron I created it from scratch as you can see in the pictures.

The dollhouse was completely illuminated now, and my granddaughter could use each of the rooms independently, without lighting them all.

I had an old 12v transformer, bought the necessary electric socket and that was it!