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Wednesday, April 2, 2014

Two More Favorites...

With any of these houses, the restoration process is about the same.  Find out what the original colors were, mostly by cleaning them.  Then putting the color back on.

This house was from the early 1800s.  I am a very bad photographer when it comes to shooting through glass, but I wanted to tell the story of this one...
It seems that the time that it was in use, it was popular to light candles in the mini houses when a battle was fought and won by the English, as well as when holidays came around.  This one has some of it's history with it.

As I remember, one of the battles that was celebrated in this manner was the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo...

When I started cleaning it up...There were circles of burnt wood on the ceilings in several places.  Hooray for Wellington!!!

Now let's burn the house down to celebrate!  Turn the kids loose with candles and matches...

It's a wonder that there are any doll houses left from that time period!  We had to find furniture to fill this one.  There was some, but not all of the original furniture.  Some of that was from a later time period.

This next one, is one is one of my favorites.  It has the best story.  It was built by the father of Thomas Andrews.  He was one of the designers of  the Titanic and was on the ship when it went down.  He had taken over from the original designer. 

It is a copy of Ardara House, where he was born.

It was a difficult restoration because the two sides come off, but the catch is, there is a center hall running the whole length of the house from front to back...The only openings were the space behind the front porch that you see and another similar opening at the back...the two don't both open at the ends.  One opening is for the bottom and the other one for the top...

Just picture me laying sideways with my arm stuck in those small openings to reach the other end.  It isn't a small house.

This is a house that I wish I had some help from Zar and Tessie.  They could have done the center hall in no time at all.

Me, not so much...

The Wednesday Witches Mini Group are coming here today, so I had better get to work.  Witches, mini or big, like to be fed and entertained.

See you tomorrow.

4 comments:

Marisa said...

oh that made me chuckle..lets burn the house down to celebrate..hehehehe

Hugs
Marisa

12Create said...

Thank you for sharing pictures and stories of these hold houses. I love vintage miniatures as well as enjoy making miniatures.

Lené said...

As long as you didn't find any mini skeletons bricked up in the old walls, I'm happy to hear of your exciting discoveries hehehehe. Our ancestors were a funny lot and had some very strange habits sometimes.

mcddiss said...

que bonitas casas y sus historias son interesantes , gracias por compartirlas
espero que la reunion fuese bien

besitos

Mari