It started in the late 1990’s….well, actually, it started a long time before then. I have always been fascinated by miniatures and by old houses.  But sometime in the late 90’s I was skimming through the shelves of the local library and I ran across a tall, slim book, full of architectural plans from 1891.

Fascinated, I took it home.

Somewhere in my brain, I decided one of these would be wonderful to turn into a miniature house, and I settled on this one:

Along with the description:

$10,000 for a whole house…maybe the dollhouse version might cost about that now.

Of course, there were a few things I wanted to add to the house….like a library. Every good Victorian house needs a library.  And a nursery.

So I started sketching a little model of what I wanted the floors to look like.

First Floor Plan: With a huge library…  The arrows on the outside show where I wanted the walls to swing outward so you could see the inside of the house.

(I’m not sure why I thought it was important to show which direction was north, but apparently…) 

Second Floor Plan : with a sewing room and nursery added…

Third Floor Plan:  under the eaves…with a billiard room in the attic, just like Samuel Clemens. Although I pity the servants who had to haul that slate up to the third floor…

(I think the numbers on the bottom right are the total numbers of lamps I thought I’d need for the rooms.)

And finally the roof tops:

Then I started measuring and sketching and making actual scale plans of the entire thing. My imagination was running wild, but I had no idea how to make these plans a reality.  So I dropped the whole project and went back to grad school instead…