Scattered Thoughts . . .

I've begun working on adding some details to Kenzie's dollhouse for this Christmas. Each holiday, I add a little bit more to this beautiful townhouse. This Christmas, however, I will be adding most of the new details after Christmas. I'll be adding quite a bit of detail parts and accessories this Christmas so I'll share photos here sometime after Kenzie opens her Christmas gifts. At this point, Lukey and Kenzie will not be at our house until Christmas morning... and they probably won't be reading this blog entry... so I can start getting some prep work done on the dollhouse and the train set. I did, however, want to add one small detail on one window of the dollhouse... this is one of five window boxes in the photos included here. Just adding this one window box makes a tremendous difference for the front elevation of this townhouse dollhouse... when I add the rest of these window boxes after Christmas (after Kenzie opens her gifts) this front elevation wil

Sheila and I had a very peaceful weekend... and it was a much needed peaceful weekend! I'm trying to recover from our Christmas festivities and rest for our big upcoming train show weekend so this peaceful weekend was welcomed. The only two things I accomplished over the weekend was to help Sheila dig out the cars and shovel snow from our driveway yesterday afternoon and I assembled two new stools for our kitchen table. (Next on my list of fairly big projects is to make a new larger table to accommodate six of us for dinner.) I haven't posted many photos lately so here are a few very recent photos of the kids... Through the window of her dollhouse...

Our original plan for Christmas was what we do every year... we invite all of Sheila's immediate family including her parents to the house on Christmas morning for presents and a big breakfast. Then, we entertain friends later in the day and into Christmas night. This is something we have been doing since before the grandchildren were born but it has become more of a family tradition since their birth. Now Sheila has her own family of three generations so we tend to do the "family celebrating" here, at our home, for her family... which is pretty typical for most families. A few days ago, an opportunity arose for us to head significantly south to much warmer climates (yes, although hard to believe, much warmer than our wet, balmy temperatures in the 50s) to celebrate Christmas with our Air Force family... I came up with a plan before I even mentioned this opportunity to Sheila... then presented it to Sheila as a surprise... and she enthusiastically jumped on it immedi

The dollhouse is finished and ready for Christmas morning! As I've mentioned in previous blog posts about this dollhouse, I designed this dollhouse to be a Georgetown-style townhouse with a brick sidewalk and small patio. I wanted to build a townhouse-style dollhouse so that the dollhouse could sprawl vertically, rather than horizontally, saving precious floor space in our small home. This was the right idea for our small home. I'm quite happy with the design but actually wish I had more time to add more details. If I were to add more details today, I would add curtains, lighting, pictures to hang on walls, window boxes with flowers, and more kitchen details.  As it is, however, it is definitely ready for Christmas morning and an excited grandchild. I'm sure Kenzie will be glued to this dollhouse the moment she sees it! Kenzie will also be receiving a doll family to use with this 1:12 scale dollhouse... a mom, a dad, a young girl, and a baby...