The Basics

This is how it looked in the advert:





BTW the little red trapdoor in the top RH corner really does open, so you could just walk out up the stairs and onto the roof (no safety rails!). The indented cream wooden part in the centre looks as if there's a piece missing, and there should be a chimney of some sort. From my time in town yesterday photographing parts of various 1950s buildings, (you can get a good view of several roofs from the top floor I'm of the library!) I think it may have been supposed to represent some kind of ventilation cover looking a bit like this (taken from the top floor of the local library!):



However, the only similar looking pieces I've been able to find are the wrong size / shape. (Dolls houses come in various scales, and I think mine is a 1:16. But, sizing wasn't always accurate, and a few mm either way can make a difference. True story, in the Dol-Toi factory that made a lot of dolls furniture from offcuts of the owners' caravan building business, if they wanted to make a bed, then the foreman would make one, and then everyone else in the factory would gather round, have a look and go off and then go off and make theirs! So there's bound to be variations.)

And this is how it looked after a good clean (cleaning  the windows made the biggest difference!) and a few little jobs like gluing 
the door frame back in place and sticking the curling edges of wallpaper (I want to keep as many of the original features as I can).



I don't know anything of its history yet. It's very possibly hand made, as so far I haven't come across anything even remotely similar. It arrived with some furniture, some of which I can definitely do something with to restore. I want to keep the wallpaper, as that's original and in the whole in good condition now I've stuck down some curling  edges, (there are a few scribble marks, but they can easily be hidden by pictures!) but the flooring is going to have to be replaced, and I would like to install some lighting (a much easier job these days than even 20 years ago, as LED battery power lights are now available, so no drilling or wiring!). Another reason I think this house could be hand made is the plywood is *much* thicker (and therefore heavier!) than on my dollshouse. I'm going to post it on a couple of dolls house websites and see if anyone recognises it or knows anything about it.




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