Page 10 - Discover Fall 2020

Tiny Renovation CONTINUED
other dollhouses that our club has raffled at the
annual fund-raiser.”
Those dollhouses, however, and their
furnishings had been brand new. Although she
did have to paint all the furniture and wall-paper
the walls (she uses decorative scrap-booking
paper as wall paper), she hadn’t had to do all of
the cleaning and mending that this older house
would require.
In August of 2019, Peter wrapped the
dollhouse and its furnishings in protective plastic,
put it all on a trailer (it was too large for his car),
and brought it from his home in Chesapeake, VA
to his mother’s home at Smith Mountain Lake.
From there, Frances, her son, and her husband
delivered the house to Lakewood Forest and
into the capable hands of Gerri Williams. Gerri
readily admits that she wouldn’t have gotten to
first base on the restoration or assembly of any of
the dollhouses without the help of her husband,
Randy.
Randy and Gerri began working on
the house in January, and soon learned that it
had been wired for electricity. This led them
to call upon a friend, Tim Armstrong, whose
wife, Rosemary, happens to be a member of
Wednesday Women along with Gerri.
“I thought of Tim for the electric wiring
because he has a model train,” Gerri said.
By mid-July, Tim, working with Randy
as a side-kick, had all the lights lit, including
the hanging porch light and the table lamps
in various rooms. Even the tiny wall toggle
switches work. The wiring in a dollhouse, Tim
learned, is composed of thin, flat strips of copper
on adhesive tape. This tape is placed under the
wall coverings during assembly. In the case of
this house, the wall coverings are decorative
wallpaper. So, he could not access the main
wiring system without damaging the walls.
However, he was able to replace the wire and
bulbs for various fixtures in the house, as well as
all of the exposed wiring in the attic under the
roof.
When Tim first saw the dollhouse, he saw
8 Discover Smith Mountain Lake FALL 2020
that the ceiling light fixtures were hanging by a
thread. Besides being repaired electrically, they
needed to be secured to the ceilings. The wire he
had to work with is an exact replica of the wiring
that is used in lamps or chandeliers, only it is
much, much smaller. He compared it in size to
a human hair. It is 30 gauge wire, which is over
2 ½ times smaller than the wiring in a typical
home. In fact, it is so small that in order to “strip”
the insulation off and expose the wire inside,
he had to buy a special tool. Soldering the wire
became a particularly exasperating challenge.
While Tim struggled with miniature
wires, and light bulbs that were not much
bigger than a good sized grain of salt, Randy
was busy carving and staining legs and other
parts to repair broken pieces of furniture. Pins
were missing from door hinges, so small that
they are hard to see without a magnifying glass.
An armoire had a quarter inch piece of wood
broken off of its front, and shutters needed to
be replaced or repaired and painted. Randy
even crafted ornamental black shutter hardware
(called “shutter dogs”), from cardboard to replace
some, made from tin, that were missing. Picture
frames no bigger than postage stamps needed
to be re-glued, and the pictures remounted. Try
doing that with fingers that cramp occasionally,
have a little arthritis, and make a fist nearly big
enough to fill an entire room in a dollhouse.
“You have to proceed the same as you
would if you were building or renovating a full
sized house,” Randy said. “You start with the
foundation and then go to the structure itself.”
The entire roof of the house had to be
rebuilt, after which fingernail-sized wooden
shingles were glued individually onto it.
Gerri, in the mean time, was washing
and polishing the wooden floors which are
featured throughout the house, except in the
bathroom where there is tile that also had to be
cleaned. She polished and arranged each piece
of furniture and every accessory. The dollhouse
boasts such detailed miniatures as bacon and
eggs frying in a skillet on the stove top, biscuits
coming out of the oven, and a meat grinder half