Stinkerpants

I have fallen victim to my friend Reichel’s peer pressure. She has convinced me to participate in the I’m a Giant Challenge, which is a dollhouse challenge started by HGTV Design Star’s Emily Henderson. The idea is to redecorate a dollhouse and, basically, make it awesome. Emily is convinced that dollhouses don't have to be weird & creepy, and has some cool ideas for making a modern, non-scary dollhouse. There are a lot of very creative people participating in the challenge - it’s pretty intimidating!

At first I thought I was lucky to already have a dollhouse from when I was a kid. With electric lights and everything! But when I had my mom send me photos, I was...underwhelmed. To be honest, I think it’s fugly, and I am totally uninspired.
 

It's entirely possible that I'm uninspired because Reichel's dollhouse is so fabulous I can't contain myself. It's hard not to be inspired by her amazing Craigslist find, am I right? I'm thinking mine needs some architectural help before I even think about the inside.

The problem is that the challenge ends in December, and I won’t have the dollhouse in my actual hands until Thanksgiving. There’s not a snowball’s chance in hell that I’ll make it on time. But I’m gonna do it anyway.

As I was saying, I’m thinking that I need to work on the outside in order to get inspired. Any ideas to make it less...blah? I’ve had a couple of ideas (see below).

 

Idea #1 is to add a third floor (kind of like a basement) then add doors that open on the side so there's more of an "outside" than there is now. Idea #2 is to add the doors and forget about the basement, but change the location of the front door. There's something about the door that irritates me.

 

What do you guys think? The stand it's sitting on won't be part of it.

 

I have (of course) created a pinterest board for the project. So far I'm thinking of doing a black & white outside and an extremely colorful inside. :) Here are a few color schemes I'm toying with:

I'm excited about the project - it will be fun to create something that C can play with (and hopefully not break) when she's older!