The Maine Cottage

 

My project for the past month or so has been finishing up (more or less) the 1:24 Maine Cottage that I started in the fall of 2020. (It had a long hiatus from early 2022 to early 2024.) The base is a Melissa and Doug portable cottage that I'd been eyeing intermittently since the early 2000s. It showed up at the Savers on Boston Post Road for $4, missing one of its dormer roofs (since replaced by Dad's cutting me a new piece).

Since I'd just been to artist-colony Ogunquit, my plan at the time was to paint it blue-gray and make it an artist's retreat. This winter, I ended up picking a new shade of blue that's more in line with the vintage Marx furniture chosen for the house.

The resident, Augusta, is a vintage Tweakie Toy made by J. Chein for a single year, 1969. Her workers and repair people are Playskool Lil Playmates from 1978-84. As you can probably guess, I'm not aiming for realism.

Part of the appeal with this house is having space for a dining room. 

The corridor kitchen is highly efficient. The "Milk Raw" sign is from an antique shop in Massachusetts. The astronaut just dropped in.

Upstairs. the bath is barely visible. On next year's to-do list for this house is figuring out how to hang a bathroom mirror on a sloped wall.

One of the decorating challenges was that, if I put the bathroom and bedroom walls in reasonable spots, I was left with a large upper hall for the stairway. So I turned it into a little library.

The blue room is the bedroom of Augusta's adult son, Stanley. During the week, he lives in Boston, where he's a businessman. His hobby is photography.

Here's Augusta's room. Long-term plan is to put a portrait of Augusta as a young woman over the fireplace, but nothing I try for that goes quite right.

Here's Augusta's studio. The brown desk has always been one of my favorite vintage Marx playset pieces, so it was one of the first things I hunted down. The easel is an improvisation, as the one I bought somewhere in late 2020 was in pieces and I could not figure out how to fix it.

Having a third bedroom was the triumph of this floorplan. My closest prior approach to a 3-bedroom house was Mom's Arrow Dream Dollhouse that I'd furnished with vintage Renwal, but I sold it instead of wallpapering and accessorizing it. Please note Augusta's cat, Kittery.

Here's Stanley himself, showing off his toys in the garage. The birchbark canoe was another Massachusetts gift-shop find. The ATV is from one of the dollar stores.

Barely glimpsed behind the vehicles is the laundry room. After taking pics, I finally realized I had the right tile for the laundry room floor, but otherwise, it's on next year's improvement list.

With this "done," my major uncompleted dollhouse project is the little birdhouse village. Next up, it's time to sew clothes for the Kid Kore Katie Krew!