DIY Barbie House

"Growing old is mandatory, but growing up is optional" ~Walt Disney

Growing up in a household with three rambunctious brothers, I spent many hours of my childhood playing with Barbies. Over the years I accumulated quite the collection and it was such a joy to dig them out of storage again when our daughters were born. I found an old plastic Barbie house on kijiji and there ensued hours of fun!

But….in no time at all, that well-loved plastic house began to crack and fall apart.

For Christmas 2019, my husband and I wanted our gift-giving to be more personal for our kids. We also wanted our gift to be something long-lasting and special. Our focus was primarily on trying to be producers, not consumers: reusing or re-purposing things we already had. So, we decided to make gifts. For the girls: a Barbie house that would stand up to the test of time without breaking apart.

This was a combined effort, as I am not handy in the slightest and he loathes tedious, detailed design:). Thus, he was the builder and I was the decorator. Before starting, I looked at lots of DIY dollhouses online for inspiration. While there are many BEAUTIFUL dollhouses with modern colour palates and furniture to drool over, I wanted to create something bright and colourful. This would allow me to use all of the old Barbie furniture I had accumulated as a child instead of having to make/buy new. If you’re thinking about designing your own dollhouse, look what materials you can scrounge up around your house before starting. This will help you cut down on cost and hone in on what design you’ll follow.

I apologize in advance for not having pictures of the building process. I often worked on this project in the evenings whenever I had some spare time and taking pictures never even crossed my mind till I was finished! Hopefully the “finished” pictures and building tips will be helpful enough for you!

Cost & Material:

We seem to be in a constant state of little do-it-yourself renovations over here at our home so we had a lot of little pieces of wood lying around to use for construction. We did end up buying new melamine for the actual structure of the house. This made it more light-weight than building it out of plywood. We used panelling for the backing of the house, something we had left-over from a recent renovation. The cost of the melamine was roughly $100. I also bought a few supplies from the dollarstore and several furniture lots off of kijiji. However, I was able to sell several lots of my Barbie collection to recoup this cost. All the fabric used in the house came from baby clothing my girls had outgrown. Instead of pitching it in the garbage, I re-purposed it to make beds, blankets, and pillows. The paint I used was dollarstore acrylic paint. If you use melamine, it is really important to use an acrylic paint because latex won’t stick to it. I also stripped down our old dilapidated Barbie house and used as many pieces as I could. This provided me with window trim, washing machine, drier, furniture, TV, media centre, and much more!

Layout:

When designing the layout of the house, I based the rooms off of the furniture/Barbie supplies I had in my collection. The house we made is very large because I wanted there to be a lot of bedrooms to accommodate our ridiculous amount of Barbies:). The rough dimensions of the house are 5 feet long, 4 ½ feet tall, and 16 inches deep. The inner walls are inset so the Barbies can walk from room to room and measure 13 inches deep. I didn’t include stairs or an elevator in my design because they didn’t seem necessary to me and the amount of space they would have taken up didn’t seem worth it.

Inspiration:

I used the following site for most of my inspiration concerning the layout/colour palate/design of the Barbie house: https://www.aneclecticeye.com/diy-dollhouse. Check out this blog if you want to be WOWED!

Specific Room Design:

I hope to create a few smaller posts about tips and tricks that went into creating items in the individual rooms at a later date. Check back later for more ideas!

For now, enjoy the pictures! Hopefully they inspire you to create something fantastic and fun! It’s safe to say that I’ve had as much fun creating this Barbie house as my girls do playing with it!