What's Cooking? My Mini Kitchen Makeover

Wanna to see my kitchen? This is my latest mini make, like my real one HERE, its furnished entirely from inherited bits and pieces, other people's junk, hand-made stuff and lucky eBay finds.

Yes, I am well and truly obsessed with decorating my doll's house. It's taken me back to being twenty-four and owning my first house, a tiny end terrace so small I could pick up a tin of paint on the way back from work from the DIY clearance centre at the bottom of my road and redecorate a room in a couple of hours whenever the fancy took me.

Friends would pop round to discover that the colour scheme had completely changed from the week before or that I'd transformed the bed's headboard, Ottoman or a chair with a piece of fabric I'd found in a charity shop and my trusty staple gun.

In those days the cupboards were bare. Back in 1990 interest rates were sky high, I was living alone and in order to afford to pay my bills & mortgage I lived on a tight budget of £25 a week. I ate at work (working in corporate hospitality wasn't all bad), cut my own hair & bought all my clothes from jumble sales - just as I'd always done - and the rest went on socialising and tins of bargain paint. My thrifty ways paid off, I was mortgage free before I was 40. 

In my mini world I still don't spend any money on food - I Google free doll's house printables and fill my cupboards for free.

In my first house I went without a fridge, I became the proud owner of a second-hand one when I reached the age of 25! In my mini house I've made one from a broken 1950s sink unit that came from my Mum's doll's house and painted it with Barry M nail varnish. Like our real one the door's adorned with Polaroids of us at Glastonbury and in India.

There's loads of these 1970s Lundby cookers on eBay. I took my time and found one for a decent price. 

When I was a child I loved buying Lundby doll's house furniture. The houses were expensive but the bits and pieces to fill them with were pocket money prices. I'd already got Mum's furniture from her childhood so I mostly bought odds and ends. The saucepans, cutlery, toaster and the loaf of bread survived years of playing. I found a photo of a Taunton Vale chopping board, sized it down, printed it off and glued it to some cardboard salvaged from the recycle bin.

These chairs were pink last week - I haven't changed. Rose wine and Ritz crackers, aren't I sophisticated?

The tea towel is made of paper but with a few folds it looks like fabric. I managed to find the matching sink to last week's kitchen unit on eBay. I made the splash back and the shelves are lollipop sticks.

I helped myself to a sample of wallpaper from Wilko's. I could have used scaled down doll's house paper like I'd used for the rest of the house but quite liked the drama of the supersized retro print.

My reading material - a copy of the NME from 1967 with The Stones on the cover.

WEARING: Green bell sleeved top (retail sale, 2017), Vintage maxi skirt with floral trim (50p sale rail, AGE UK, yesterday), 1970s wooden pendant (Free from the hospice charity shop, the lady insisted I had it!)

I need to crack on with the outside restorations for Number 62, my latest house arrived this morning and I'm itching to get cracking on the next project. Addicted? Me? Absolutely!

See you soon.