Barnstorming... and a surprise!

Thorne has found a dollhouse that's very much to her tastes.

"I don't think it'll fit in my room, though... unless it IS my room."

As I confessed on the last meme, my source of inspiration is roaming. Not seeing anything in particular -- though that helps -- but just roaming. So the trip to Flagstaff restarted my blood flowing, and then, as I mentioned to JoJo, as a Westerner, I find New England wildly exotic, even though I lived sporadically in the Northeast long enough that the glamour should have dissipated.

A peculiar feature of New England and upstate New York is the "book barn." It seems that used books are best sold in barns -- preferably hidden up winding country roads -- and these barns ordinarily employ cats. There was something soothing about striding into a book barn, scooping up a cat, and proceeding to browse. The Book Barn of Niantic was particularly good for this, plus it offered the extra fillip of goats. (I did not scoop up goats. Goats kick.)

So I looked at my 3/8-scale barn, where I'd never figured out how to finish the upper floor, and I thought it needed books.

The kind of shelving that people build in barns and sheds!

Out came my scrap wood, and I built a bookcase. The "framed" art on top is from a flyer I got at the Mesa Contemporary Arts Museum last year, so these are all the works of contemporary Western artists who've exhibited there. The Native American statue is from the trip to Flagstaff, as is the guitar on the wall (which is more a ukelele at this scale), and then I made a little amp for it.

Don't get too comfortable.

Then I thought a lounge chair would be nice. This one, I may redo in more elegant style later, but it'll do for the time being.

The cow got its hoof caught on the moon and tripped.

Since I'm fascinated by barn ads, the barn (or chicken coop, whatever I'm calling it this year) had to have one. This design is printed from a matchbook for the Milk Farm Restaurant on I-80 in California. (I never had a chance to eat there, but the roadside sign remains a major landmark.) This raises the question of where the barn -- or chicken coop -- is supposed to be, since book barns and barn ads aren't really Northern California things.

There's a simple answer: I have no idea. The lack of any visible heating system suggests it should be located somewhere like Lompoc, and it's not like anybody's going to volunteer to go to Lompoc to prove that a barn like this is a geographic impossibility.

View from above.

The ladder is also a new addition, probably a little too sturdy, but I was running out of wood scraps. The upper painting is from a Phoenix Public Library exhibit, so it, too, is a real work by a contemporary Western artist. The bottom art comes from... I don't know, kindergarten mah jongg?

And I built the bed, which is pretty much my proudest moment in construction.

Open-plan kitchen

The rocker and table are what started this whole project: I found them in an antique store while out shopping with my mother one day, and they were too cute for me to be deterred by their not being any known scale. There's a china ice box at the bottom of the photo (its matching stove is outside the frame) that is the exact same scale, so now there's a house.

It really needs an armoire for storage. And three attempts to build one have gone pear-shaped on me, so I think it's time to declare victory and set the barn on its shelf for a bit.

Among other reasons, there's a new distraction!

Nastia and Miranda want to know what THIS is.

My parents sent a box of Avon resin dollhouse furniture. It's sort of half-scale and entirely adorable. Right now, it's in a spare shadow box to reduce the chances of my dropping and breaking a piece, but this box is too small.

Little cups! Tiny pots!

Look at the detail on this! Ordinarily, I don't like my accessories permanently attached, but there is such a consistent concept on this. See how the books on the fireplace match the books on the desk? And there's a spaniel!

This dog knows the meaning of "sit."

The kitchen dresser is Miranda's favorite piece -- mine, too.

So many little plants!

So I'm trying to decide on a house (remember houses, those things I wasn't going to build more of? mmm hmmmm), as this won't mix well with the 1:24 condo, and there exist more furniture sets. The hypothetical house now has its own Pinterest board to help me remember what I've already ruled out through obsessive Googling. This also allows me to wallow in craziness like "I could build exactly what I want from foam core" without pulling out a tile cutter and doing anything reckless that takes over the kitchen counter.

Eh, it's fine if you don't care about floor space.

It would seem that, in the month after I instituted a "no dollhouse-building" policy, I've committed to building two dollhouses. Oh, and there's a third project in the mail...