Rainbow High Color and Play House (Part Three)

 Oh, my aching back.  And knees.

But progress is being made.

I used a box flap to make a "door" for where the two houses meet.  You can see it better in the first picture... very in keeping with the whole rainbow theme.  I can't decide if I like that blue sectional or not. 

The kid room's "door" on the second floor.

On the dining room side, I taped a calendar picture to the back of the box flap.

The unopened kitchen set, two unopened bathroom sink & toilet sets, the second sectional, and the used pink kitchen.  These are available for adoption by my dolly friends.  First come, first served.

I spent most of the day sitting about where that rice cooker is, sorting through the pantry. Who put the floor so dang far down there?!  

Kitchen, complete with stocked cabinets and fridge.  I managed to keep most of the pantry.  That tall skinny shelf is from the Minibrands Books.  Most of the appliances are Minibrands Home - the scale is not consistent at all, but I can make it work. The food items are mostly Wacky Packages or Shopkins. Dishes are mostly Teeny Tinies or Minibrands Home.

Dining Room.  Each table came with only two chairs but I put all four around this table.  It's too small for the huge family I'm gonna have in this house, but how often does a whole family sit down and eat together nowadays?  I did keep the second table for things like Thanksgiving.  I have a whole bunch of dining chairs (mostly pink) on standby, too.

Living room.  I'm still undecided about the sectional.  

Library.  The tiny chair here and the one in the last picture are from the Minibrands Home collection - they work well for the babies.  The wall art says "I read banned books".  Can you guess where most of the books came from?

Bunkroom.  They can't fit much more in here! 

One of the teen or adult rooms.  Gage for scale.  (Not really.  He was just there.)

Little bunkroom.  The larger playthings I left on the bookcase as a basement playroom.

Second teen/adult room. 

Parents-of-baby's room.

Deck number one is for fooseball.  Also babies and kitties.

Quilter's room.

Deck number two is for the telescope. Jonathan is sitting on the "ball" from a Lord of the Rings Minibrand.  I just liked the look and decided it's a stool.  

Doll corner.  The plastic bins with sorted accessories are on top of the shelving unit. Three shelves and a tabletop full of people - and that's after I stopped the soap opera and thinned them out! Fourth shelf is the basement playroom. Bottom shelf holds my set pieces like the schoolroom. Clothes are in the big bin under the table. Standby furniture is in the purple bucket beside Hogwart's Express.

This dollhouse will be the primary set for storytelling.  Also, if you come over, you can play with it. 

Rainbow High Color and Play House (Part Two)

 

I noticed another creepy.  This is the back "window" of the room with the emerging faces!  I can't decide if these gals are the stalkers or the stalkees.  Anyway, it's up against my wall, so no biggie there.

Building the second house was quicker, mainly because I knew what I was doing this time.  No backward dividing walls this time, I promise!

The smaller first floor room is going to be a little library.  I had scrapbook paper that was books, but it wasn't big enough to do the whole area, so I went with this nice pink. I still need to secure the edges with clear tape. I sure wasn't going to try maneuvering around the trompe l'oeil plant again, but I kept the wainscoting on the side walls.  I do like wainscotting.

The larger first floor room will be the living room.

Gotta figure out what to do here.  My dolls do have some nice big shelving units that they might be able to hide it behind.  Curtains or a fake door are options, as well.

This is the second floor where the houses meet up.  Same solutions are being considered, even if this one might work as is.  Looks like a glass door!  

 This side of the first floor joining could be a pass-through.  Maybe I can find some low enough shelves to fill the bottom of the doorway on the other side. We shall see.

Fluffy cat moved in already.  Brought a candle and basket of playing cards.

I hoped to put the two attics together or the two decks.  Then I considered not using the center attic and having a really big deck.  But I decided to just have a weird looking house.  

These are the included  furniture, etc.  I have two of each because I got two houses.

Clockwise starting on Rusty's lap: Beds, kitchen appliances, bathroom sinks and toilets, couches, dining tables and chairs, markers, and assorted doodads.

I will definitely be replacing my current kitchen with the bigger and less pink set.

The bed that came with the house is just a teeny bit short.  The My First Barbie bed is much longer because My First Barbie is 14 inches tall.  I bought it because it's wide enough to be a double bed.  Note the trundle bed on the MFB. Since I'm going to have six bedrooms, they will all be used.

The blue sectional in the corner is the RH couch.  The other blue is Monster High and the pink/gray daybed is, of course, Barbie.  I have a lot of living room furniture to choose from.

This is how things looked when I stopped for supper.

Rainbow High Color And Play House (Part One)

 Apologies for sideways photos.  I keep forgetting to rotate on the computer before uploading here. I've forgotten how to do it here, if I ever did know. 

I came across this while idly browsing through Amazon.  It's the Color and Play House, it was on sale for less than 90 bucks, so I snatched it up.  In fact, I snatched two because I know my dolls are gonna need more than five rooms!  They live in large family groups! 

I was confused by the listing.  Some of the wording contradicted the pictures and the video.  But hey, for that price, I'll take my chances.  Decent Barbie-size houses at a reasonable price are few and far between.  (Decent by my definition.  Your mileage may vary.)

Rainbow High is one of those doll lines that has giant heads and eyes but really cool stuff.

This is what it looks like freshly assembled.  The ad calls the exterior a "blank slate" for kids to draw and color on, with the included washable markers.  This is the main thing that confused me.  I expected a totally white exterior!

That said, this is might be the most aesthetically pleasing dollhouse exterior I've ever seen.  I can pretend this is trompe l'oeil artwork!  Most dollhouses, if they bother with exterior decoration, look pretty dang cartoonish.

Here's the other view.  Each room is partially colored in just like the outside.  I rather like it, just as it is, and was relieved to see renovations would be minimal.  For that price I was willing to trot out my craft supplies.  But it turns out only the first floor needed work.

(Cropped from an online picture because I accidentally deleted mine)

This is the majority of the "living room" wall.  A huge television mounted on the back wall.  And those faces.  I've seen too many horror flicks to allow faces emerging from the wall!  Giving me the creeps.

 

Top floor is meant to be the bedroom. 

There is more trompe l'oeil artwork throughout the inside the house.

Oh, and a deck.

Second floor is meant to be a kitchen and dining area.

Contact paper in the living room area. No emerging faces or giant always-on TVs allowed! 

I put the wall between living room and bath in backwards.  No wonder it was so hard to screw together!  I left this side of the dividing wall alone because the horse picture takes up most of it and no faces were emerging.  That horse looks like he's made of crystal!  Since the walls here were already mismatched, I covered the back wall with another contact paper.

Shaping the wallpaper around that fake plant was a nightmare.  This wall will be totally covered in the second house.  I doubt either of them will be a bathroom.  I dislike dollhouse bathrooms - why's everyone so determined to make Barbie poop? 

I do have a folding-house bathroom and toilets in two of the campers if someone insists.

Bad shot of the crystal horse painting.

This does come with furniture and stuff, but y'all gotta wait til I'm moving the dolls in to see that.  My plan is to have them side-by-side.  First floor will be living, dining, kitchen, and library.  Second and third will be bedrooms and/or a playroom.  One deck will be just that.  

The other will be walled on both sides so might be turned into another room.  We shall see.

Thank you Ms Leo

 Ms Leo, of the i-luv-dolls blog, asked me if I would be willing to adopt a GI Jane.  I'm always up for unusual "Barbies", so I said sure. 

WARNING WARNING NEKKID PLASTIC PEOPLE AHEAD

My dolls immediately put up lookouts for their new friend.

This is what I was expecting to receive.

This is what I found among all the bubble wrap.  Jane brought along her whole fam damily!

We have Hannah Montana's bestie (Lily?), one of the Encanto sisters (Isabel?), a headless really dark dude, a pale clone of Jackson from one of the Barbie movies, and Jane herself.  Also a bag of heads.

Heads.  I recognize all but one of them.

Bald guy, Justin, Aaron, Dude from Wicked (Fiero? No, that's a car), Anthony, Disney Prince (Beast)

Ms Leo sent along a donor body for Lily.  

She knows my aversion to poorly articulated knees and elbows.

Izzy is a substantial woman.  Also well articulated.

I'm going to call this kid Jason.  He is unable to bend the knee.  Or elbow.

Levar (named for Levar Burton, one of my celebrity crushes) is a Fashionista head.  He only matches females in my body bin.  He thanks Ms Leo for thinking of him!  It's not perfect, but it works.  Lily's already flirting with him on her new body.

He rejected her so hard her leg fell off.  Meanie.

So I brought out the bins.  Jason and the noggins wonder if they might have a match in there.  I'm already thinking of one for Lily.

The only kid body I have is too small and too tan.  The pale bodies are all too female.  

Levar says "Well, at least you still have a stiff body.  I didn't even have that."  

I managed to find a body for the Wicked dude, who is based on actor Jonathan Bailey, so he will be Jonathan. Lily has painted on hose but she prefers that to a missing leg!  Everyone put clothes on.  Except Jason, who was already dressed.

Meet Jonathan, Jason, Jane, Izzy, Levar, and Lily.