Dollhouses!

The Goodwill around here has made friends with Craigslist.  Or should I say Good Will has become friends with Craig Slist.   Bah!  Anyway, because of this "friendship", the Goodwill has made an enemy out of me.  I mean, not an actual enemy, but they've thoroughly annoyed me.  You see, the Goodwill posts items on Craigslist, not as a "Hey! Come check these out at the store!" thing, but more of a "We're holding these items hostage" thing.  Seriously, you have to call ahead and tell them you want to look at the item, then they get it from the warehouse, and bring it out to you when you show up at the store.  Then they wheel it back to the bowels of their building if you reject it.  If you buy it, however, they have this crazy handwritten receipt system that takes at least five minutes to execute.  Insane.  I really don't understand why they are doing this.  Plus you have to have exact change.  Plus you can only go see the items M-F from 9:30am to 2:30pm.  Inconvenient!

Bah!  Anyway, I recently went through this process.  I'd been eyeballing some dollhouses over the last month or two on the local Craigslist site, but had never had time to get down there.  They wheeled out the three dollhouses that they had in their warehouse.  It was a little great, because I got to check them out all by myself.  I ended up getting two of them for $20.00 total.  

I am only going to renovate one, but I got the second one, because it had a bunch of furniture and other secret things in the bottom of the box and I wanted the things.

Ready for some dollhouse pictures??

Front

The inside.

I'm going to keep this brown house.  It has no curb appeal at all (see that first photo), but it was handmade and dated:

And it is so sturdy.  I'm serious...this is really a solid piece of craftsmanship.

Here are some photos from the inside:

And then here's the second dollhouse:

Front

It's got some crazy good curb appeal.  Gorgeous, right?  The other one looks like a sad shack in the woods up in Bonny Doon with rabid dogs chasing away strangers.  This one is all elegant with the columns and whatnot, but it's just not sturdy and I like the inside of the other one better:

And the windows were really beaten up...that's something I don't think I'd be able to fix:

But it came with stuff!  Of course, as it turns out, the scales of these two houses are completely different and I don't think I'll be able to use much with the other house, but if the girls play with Barbies, they can have some inflatable furniture:

Do you remember these?  Awesome!   I had them as a kid.  I can't wait to blow them up.  This alone was worth the ten bucks to me.  So cool.

I am going to throw out this Ken doll vest...that's some very dead animal skin right there.

More stuff:

And this little fridge is adorable, but the wrong scale:

I am going to keep this little doll and this Barbie lounge chair, though.  Fun.

So I've got a lot of work to do.  I don't anticipate giving it away to the kids for a few years, but I'm glad to have it as a long term project.  I've been pinning ideas.  Yay!