Mar 14, 2016

Elevator (Dollhouse Tutorial)

After much reluctance with lack of room, and one too many times playing with her cousins Barbie dreamhouse and asking for one, once we finally moved, the lady and I bought our daughter a dollhouse. It was a giant wooden one, the kind of shell model ones that you could buy things to put in, buy nifty, thrifty attachments for, make your own stuff, and not the typical "you must buy only this brand of attachment to make it work" it was a sort of work in progress, which was cool, the empty shell that we had/have shows me so much potential for it rather than the cookie cutter ones that are on TV where Barbie looks the same. We could design anything to what our daughter wants, or hell to what we want, rip the rooms apart, and redesign them, with furniture, decorations, etc.

Well while putting it together, we all realized quickly that it was bigger than we imagined, it was over 3 fucking feet tall, taller than our daughter, she was stoked, and we were overwelmed. She also realized that it didn't have the elevator like her cousins, fuck.

That was a few solid weeks of pestering, "where is my elevator daddy?" I had to explain to her that we were building a cooler one that wouldn't break after 3 pulls like her big cousins did when she put all of her weight on it, oh yeah I wasn't fucking around with this thing, I already put lights in this thing, I wasn't shortcutting the fucking elevator.

So without further fucking A Deux here's the tutorial on my experience.

Step 1: Coat Hangers

Our daughter loves the color green, lucky for fucking us we had a lot of green shit laying around. You need 4 of these coat hangers to be equal length, and they have to be the coat hangers that have the little plastic over hang in them for the notching part, it'll play an important part later. (Just trust me fucker). I measured and cut the coat hangers I found with a power saw at 8 inches (that means they were 16, yay, fucking math.

Then notched out the little parts I talked about in that sentence up there. ^^ (What if we could read our own minds? That'd be awesome, I think they have a word for that, it's called thinking.)

Measuring

Cutting

Step 2: Basket

I cut one of the fronts of the basket off, leaving the entire bottom. I made sure that as much of sides were exposed as possible, and lightly sanded some of the rough spots.

Step 3: Roof

Remember them notches I told you to make? You don't? huh, well fuck you. I made em! Anyways, they're used for this next step.

You need a 1/16 drill bit, if you wanna go "whole hog" and skip the bit part, just use 1/16 screws, but just make sure the hangers are hollowed out or this isn't going to work.

A.) On each corner of the basket take one of your coat hanger bars, grip it with a pair of adjustable pliers and screw it into place through the basket and hollowed out hanger.

B.) Take about 3-4 larger slip ties and slip tie all of the hangers in the center where the saw notched them out and snip the left over ends off with sissors or needle nose pliers. (They may need some adjustments and may look a little cockeyed at first, it'll come together.)

1/16 Drill Bit Drill out Hanger

Drill Hole In Basket Clamp & Hold

Place Slip Ties In Notches Attach Together

Step 4: Covering

We let our daughter pick her own colors for this part. For durability sake, we went with a thick texture and just let her go wild on the colors. Mom's DIY hand came into play on this one because I suck at hot gluing.

A.) She hot glued pink fabric in and outside of the top part of the top part of canopy part of the elevator leaving just enough through the top for the hook.

B.) Next the green duct tape went on the sides, overlapping the pink to hold it down a little more. Then on the bottom to give a cool effect to the floor. NOTE: Don't forget to do the ins, outs & BOTTOM of the elevator as well, if not, it'll be a sticky mess.

C.) The Trim went on, a pretty black with silver hot glued on.

D.) The hook link went on through the top part of the fabric.

A B

C D

Step 5: Hanging

A.) I took the bracket and drilled it into the side of the dollhouse to the place we were going to put the elevator.

B.) I attached the pulley to the bracket while lady looped the rope around the rope clamps. NOTE: Make sure you have enough fucking rope! NOT TOO MUCH, NOT TOO LITTLE!

This knot will ensure that your kid will not un-fuck this rope. Follow the inception Step by Step.

After that. I looped the the rope down to the elevator leaving enough slack to tie that SAME KNOT to the hook link.

Another last minute detail was trimming and burning the ends of the rope, if you're an older kid trying to do this, fucking don't, let your parents do this, you'll burn the house down.

Step 6: Hooks

Since this dollhouse was 3 fuck floors, we had to come up with a way to let them get on and off each floor. Using the rope clamp we figured out where to put the screw in hanger hooks.