Dollhouse Part 2

In the last couple of days, I've got a little more done on the Dollhouse.
I got the interior of the roof painted, and covered the chimney with "brick". The Chimney will go through the hole cut in the top of the roof.

I also finished papering the back of the house. Here are the 2 side walls and the back wall standing up next to each other. For the attic, its been papered to look like bare wood. The footings for the roof are also visible on the top of the walls.

Abby has been wanting a dollhouse for her Barbies for a little while. Last week she went to play at a friend's house, who had such a dollhouse. She was so excited and REALLY, REALLY wanted one of her own. I'd been looking for a project, and last year I had thought about doing a dollhouse, so when she told me about how much she wanted a dollhouse, I decided to start one.
The house was built on a scale, that Abby's Barbies would fit. This made it a pretty big house. Here's the rough cut dollhouse. It'll be 3 floors and an attic tall and have 2 rooms on each of the 3 floors. The attic will be for the babies to play in (according to Abby, which makes me wonder where that came from).

Here's a view of the attic with it's chimney and the trap door (for the babies to climb up)

I built 2 stair cases for the lower 2 floors. Each one is big enough for the Barbies to climb

After I finished the initial cutting, it was time to decorate the dollhouse. We laid out all the "wallpaper" to plan which color each room would be. Abby helped pick out all the colors.

This is one of the walls. Each wall has a window cut into the wood, but they're covered with paper right now. Once the house is assembled, I'll add wainscotting around the bottom of each floor, which will cover up all the labels and the bare wood.

This is the other wall in the middle of being covered with paper.

And finally the back wall. Five of the six rooms have been papered, and each dividing wall will meet the back wall at the intersection of the paper.

I'll post more pictures as the project continues.

Road Trip post #2

Before we got to Sweetwater to stay for our first night, we started to drive through this windfarm. The kids really thought they were cool and it really made the drive less boring! Here is an oil pump with the windmills in the background.

If you look really close you can see just how many windmills there were on the horizon in this picture. They went on for miles and miles and miles!

Road Trip August 2010

Back in the spring we planned a trip to Arizona to see Toby's sister, Mitzi. After we let the rest of the family know our plans, everyone else decided to join the party! We hadn't decided if we were going to fly or drive, but after looking at prices of tickets we decided to make it a road trip. We left our house the morning of July 31st and realized that we would be in Austin at about lunch time. We had heard of this restaurant on the lake called "The Oasis" so we called our friends that live in Austin and they agreed to meet us there for lunch. This first picture is the front of the restaurant and gift shop. They had some cool statues and flowers and stuff out there.

When you walk through to the back of the restaurant this is what you see. It is beautiful. There are about 5 stories and most of the tables have a wonderful lake view.

After lunch with the Pullmans we got back on the road and drove until we couldn't drive anymore. We stayed that night in Sweetwater, TX in the middle of a windfarm. Pictures of the windfarm to come. All in all it was a pleasant first day.

First Tongue

The other day we were driving with the kids. Molly was being silly and stuck the tip of her tongue out just a little bit. She told me (Toby) that she was sticking out her first tongue.
Me: Molly, if that's your first tongue, where's your second tongue.
Molly opened her mouth and touched her tongue in the middle
Me: Is that your second tongue?
Molly: Yes
Me: How can that be both your first and second tongue?
Molly: Good!

We both started laughing so hard at her.

I guess we learned that if Molly doesn't like the question, she'll answer a question that she likes better.