It started as a simple handyman project, a lark to keep me sane after my father died weeks before the pandemic lock down. This old dollhouse had to be donated, or dealt with, and I decided to restore it. Things veered off, as they sometimes do, and eventually the dollhouse began to breathe on its own. It had a story to tell that had been stored away for decades. Inside lay a hidden tunnel to the past that had been waiting all this time for someone to come back and listen.

But this comes later. Let’s start the story where the maker did.

Foundations

My mother Sally was an artist, and built the dollhouse circa 1975. She did all the carpentry, built a rolling stand with casters, installed staircases, made paned windows, added exterior woodwork, and designed a wonderful roof line. It wasn’t a kit. She designed everything herself.

When it was finally done, she said a little sadly, “I think you girls may be too old for it now.”

I couldn’t bear to give it away, but it’s 3 x 4 feet so not an easy-to-store memento. This neglected beauty had seen hard times – decades in a damp, often wet basement. It had wood rot, cracked and crazed paint, and the stand was coming apart.

Inside was a time machine of jumbled furniture, often broken, and a thick layer of dirt. This was probably exactly as the dollhouse was left whenever someone played with it for the last time, then walked away and never returned. Probably my nieces, fifteen years ago. That’s a unique sadness inherent to dollhouses. They become abandoned ghosts.

My goal was to restore my mother’s vision then donate the dollhouse to our local historical society which just happens to have some miniatures already. I thought I’d write it all up here and send out the story to her friends, most of whom probably have no idea Sally even did this. Mostly though, it’s a story for my sister.

The project has turned out to be much more than a straightforward restoration. In taking on the dollhouse, I have an opportunity to do one last art project with my mother, a final collaboration.

But it’s more than that, even.

With my head inside her rooms, looking at her craftsmanship, the way she constructed things, touching and handling things she made, Mom’s house whispers to me. It’s a gateway back to my dead mother when she was young and bursting with creativity. I found pencil marks for measurements left like pentimento. Clever patch work she’d hidden, furniture altered for scale. As a child, I only saw a dollhouse. Now, I saw the artist peeping behind the windows. I realized if I was lucky, I might come to understand her in a new way through this cipher of a house.

One thing I love about art is that everything you see represents a moment of choice, of a thought in the artist’s mind just before the brushstroke, or as the chisel is lifted. Everything about my mother’s dollhouse represents her decisions – yes, that’s how I’m going to accomplish that – and through these, she reveals herself.

As I began to really see how she’d put this together, her technical skills and problem solving were impressive. “Ah, that’s how you did that,” I’d say. Or, “Oh, now I see why you had to do that…” as I suddenly understood some specific constraint she’d had to work around.

When I began the project, a dollhouse was just a dollhouse. But I’ve come to understand it as a microcosm, as a stand-in for the self. Like a synecdoche, it is steadily filling in the macro of my mother.  In a very real way, I have entered into her interior life, a time capsule of her thinking as it was when she built this house. She was in her early forties, married over a decade, a mother of four. I’m catching her at a very interesting time. Young enough to think about roads not traveled and possibly, whether it’s still not too late to bolt for another life.

As I fell under the spell of the dollhouse, nearly fifty years later, I’ve realized that in the end, the dollhouse wasn’t really for my sister and me. It was for her. A miniature world is a simulacrum, a view of rooms you can see all at once, omniscient, and you alone control. She became hooked. And so have I, all these years later.

Empty rooms await

Synecdoche is a term for when a part of something refers to the whole of something or vice versa. It is often used as a type of personification by attaching a human aspect to a nonhuman thing.

Looking at the rooms

First, I wish I’d taken better pictures at the outset. (I’ve gotten better.)

The movers dropped the dollhouse off in June, 2020 and everything inside was toppled and piled up. I couldn’t resist setting up everything as I remembered it. The memories were visceral.

Then I took everything out, and separated what was broken for a repairs day. It was incredibly dirty. I had no idea how fragile it was so I started gently and dusted. Then I went in with Q tips.

I cleaned and cleaned and realized I was going to get a lot more serious than Q tips. The paint was in terrible shape, the house was listing on its stand… this was more like a full rehab.

The house itself is structurally very sound. Mom built in it plywood and it’s plumb and true as the year she built it. I like how she integrated the plywood, using it to act as hardwood (except in the kitchen and bath where she laid “flooring.”) I like that she didn’t finish the ends of the walls or the floors by painting them but allows the wood to show through. That’s a mark of how she loved architecture – she wanted the viewer to think about how things are constructed.

One of my favorite things is how each room is wallpapered in tiny little prints, each different. These have not aged well but the patina is great, and gives the house the feel of an old building which can’t be faked.

I mentioned the goal is to donate the dollhouse to the local museum where children could enjoy it like we loved the Art Institute’s miniature Thorne Rooms and Colleen Moore’s castle at the Museum of Science and Industry. The dollhouse needs to be made, uh, attractive to them, so they’ll want it. My sister had a brilliant suggestion. “Why don’t you make each room a different time period? You could tell the story of the town that way.”

Sally would have loved this idea. The kitchen already had mostly 1920s furniture and an ancient wall phone so it was kismet. With six rooms you can go from the 20s to the 70s, a good overview of the 20th century. The porch can be the 1980s. The attic’s “antiques” would represent the past, before 1920.

There is so much furniture and tons of accessories. Probably 200 items – from tiny silverware to art to bed covers to furniture she reupholstered. And the styles! Everything from Colonial to 60s mod. I hope to use most of it and add some new things to flesh out the rooms in the style of their designated decade.

My mother had an encyclopedic knowledge of art, architecture, antiques and so many things. She was a serious collector. Dollhouse bits are no different. Most of these pieces came from the little hobby shop in our town. This was way back before big box stores, when real humans, your neighbors, owned stores and you knew them.

We loved that place. My mother would take my brother in for model airplane stuff and I would tag along for art supplies. But I now think there was a hardcore dollhouse component to those trips.

Mom always made a beeline for that dollhouse aisle. It had all these tiny little Shackman dollhouse pieces. They were sold by a toy store in NYC on Fifth Ave called B. Shackman, and were made in Japan. They are really lovely pieces, often Colonial, with wonderful details and workmanship. Really, they are magical. You would order a catalog from them and buy direct or some would make their way to your very own, small town hobby store.

Shackman stuff is very hot on eBay. There is nothing of that quality today. For the redo, I’m going to only buy vintage, what Sally would have used.

The glory of Shackman

Without a second pair of hands, it’s hard to lay down your precious dollhouse. Like the Egyptians, I built pillow pyramids to gently put her on her side.

She needed her undercarriage stabilized first. The dollhouse sits on four legs on casters which no longer moved. The old L braces were rusty and coming out. Two legs were kinda tipsy.

First I removed the old L braces and added 4 new ones. The drill was totally useless because the spaces are so cramped. You really needed elf fingers to twist the screws in and I stripped a few with appropriate oaths but got it done.

Next I oiled the casters with WD-40 to free them and they spun gloriously.

Then I sanded the legs and worked on the wood rot which I filled with putty.

There was a lot of cracking to the exterior walls. Also it looked like she’d covered and patched over an earlier window concept. It was ghosting through. I started sanding down as much as I could then spackled. Once I looked closer, it turned out to be cracking almost over the entire house – on walls, joints, woodwork. Well of course, it’s had zero attention and we all know stuff sags by 50. It’s still incredibly sound and solid.

I used the pink spackle that turns white when it’s ready for sanding. I tend to get a little over-eager so I love that visual signal it’s safe to start.

The dollhouse stand was badly stained, and peeling so I painted it a high gloss white which I had on hand.

It looked good so I decided to also prep the house wood work for a gloss trim. This was my first defection from my mother’s matte vision but I think it makes it look more modern and well maintained.

I think the front will represent today. I am going to make a historical society plaque for the front, like we had in the house where my sister and I grew up.

I was about ready to sand so it was time to heft her up and get the wheels on the ground. How would she do? Wow – she glided beautifully, her back was erect and proud. Underskirts done!

You’ve had the preamble. Time for a peek at the original inside. I photographed the rooms after I organized the jumble the way I remembered it (with a few adult design choices in furniture arranging of course). Go to the Before Tour page in the top navigation. This is pretty much as it was in the 1970s.

As the wind of the wing of madness begins to flap over my ambition, I’m realizing there may be more changes to the rooms to tell the story of the town and the different decades, so creating a record is essential. I wanted to be able to always look back where we came from.

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