Doll House Part 3: House Front

Planning the actual doll house was a process because I'm not the best carpenter, so my it had to be pretty easy to build.

But I wanted something that looked kind of special, so I designed the front half to open up like cupboard doors.
So once the actual house is ready to go, the facade of the fronts will be nailed onto the house, but had to be finished on their own first.

I'm pretty excited about this part of the process!

This is my inpsiration dollhouse found on pinterest:

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So I drew up plans, and got stuck trying to think of a cool way to do the windows with my limited tools.

My mom came to the rescue with her scroll saw.
I mailed her the template for the house front halves and all the windows, and she cut them all out and brought them to Thanksgiving.

My mom is pretty awesome, she cut out all the above stuff for the dollhouse, the worst probably being all those windows!

The base of each house front is 1/2" MDF, having the holes for the windows and arch for the front door.
For the windows, she cut the basic frames from the templates I sent using 1/4" thin luan scraps she had

Then she added the perimeter from 1/8" hardboard for dimension.

She also went above and beyond by making windowsills.  

Each windowsill is three layers of the luan glued together, the middle layer being longer than the top and bottom.

I painted all the windows white with spray paint/ primer.

For the actual house front, I had bought a package of hexagon shingles from Hobby Lobby.
One package was around $3.50 I think.

I marked lines on the top 1" apart, then just used wood glue to attach each shingle.

I staggered the rows, breaking the first shingle in half vertically so they would layer on each other overlapping the seams.  The last few shingles on each row had to be sawed down with the house angle once dry.
I found a lot would just break clean at the edge by hand too.

Next I spray painted the shingles once they dried. 

Then the house front became robin's egg blue.

 I've used the paint on a lot on different projects, and this dollhouse will be the last unfortunately--the one quart is almost gone!

Once dry, I just glued the window frames to the house front along with the windowsills.

This was a really fun part of the process, now to put the whole house together!