Time to share another room from my renovated childhood dollhouse! Up next: the Main Bedroom tour. Read on for lots of pictures, details, and colorful, flowery inspiration.
DIY Dollhouse Bedroom Before
Fun fact: in my actual childhood bedroom, my mom used ribbon to make a chair rail border. Above the border was wallpaper and below was painted. So it tracks that as the original designer of my dollhouse, she’d use ribbon to decorate the main bedroom in my dollhouse.
In the blurry ‘before’ photo you can see that there were also curtains on the window and rust brown wall to wall carpeting on the floor.
At the time of the photo above, I’d finished the “bones” of the room: the floors, walls, and trim. I selected the furniture I wanted to reuse from my childhood and started tweaking the layout.
DIY Dollhouse Bedroom After
I love how this room turned out! It’s bright and colorful, featuring my favorite icy aqua mint color but a bit toned down with the light gray. All the patterns & textures work so well together, I’m sure that Mom & Dad Calico Critter are just delighted with the remodel!
The Details
DIY Dollhouse Bedroom Walls & Floors
I used two different patterns of wallpaper in this main bedroom. The vine pattern is an actual wallpaper sample, adhered with Mod Podge. The polka dot wallpaper is patterned scrapbook paper. Originally the floors were covered with burnt orange colored fabric. I spent quite a while removing the fabric as well as the adhesive residue and replaced it with a piece of light gray felt.
Balsa wood baseboards give a nice finishing touch. I painted the wood first, then glued in place with my fave fast grab tacky glue.
The Bedroom Furniture
Most of the furniture in this room is my original furniture from the 1970s, but updated.
The brass bed was in good condition and I even refrained from spray painting it, leaving it the original color. I sewed all the bedding out of cotton fabric. Tip: a mini quilting iron is a great way to get crisp edges on your dollhouse bedding. The lovely turquoise coverlet was hand knit by a lovely friend and I adore the texture and pop of color it adds!
The chest of drawers is another original piece. Back in the day it was a highboy chest with legs. For the renovation, I removed the legs, added beads as feet, and spray painted the whole piece a creamy white.
No closet, no problem for these Calico Critters because they have an armoire. So fancy. Once again, I painted the over the dark wood of the original and went with a creamy white.
I even fashioned some hangers out of wire and designed a few pieces of clothing: several dresses from Ms. Calico Critter, and a vest for her hubby.
The side tables were also from my original dollhouse and were dark wood. Aqua paint really gave them an updated, whimsical look.
Art & Accessories
Although this is a small room, there are lots of fun, diy details.
I made the lamps out of a wooden bead and a piece of a skewer, with a button at the base for stability. The shades are a stack of felt furniture pads wrapped in a heavier weight scrapbook paper. The finials are stacked glass beads.
I used another wooden bead to create the planter on top of the armoire. For the plant, I colored cardstock with a green alcohol ink marker, cut out leaf shapes, and glued them to strips of wire. A fold in the middle of each leaf gives them dimension.
The vase on the chest is a painted wooden spool filled with millinery flowers. I glued a small circle of cardstock to the bottom of the spool to keep the flower stems from falling out.
The artwork in the dollhouse bedroom is from three different places. The framed floral over the bureau (my favorite) is a card that came with a piece of artwork I bought many years ago from a Scottish artist on Etsy. Over the bed is the front of a small notecard that my mom sent me more than 10 years ago. The seed packet art on top of the armoire is part of a piece of patterned scrapbook paper mounted to thin cardboard. There’s a reason why I save everything lol…
There you have it, the Main Bedroom tour! This room certainly came a long way from its ribbon millwork and dark furniture beginnings and I couldn’t be more pleased with the renovation.
I hope you found some inspiration for decorating your own dollhouse. Need more ideas? Check out more room tours of my renovated childhood dollhouse:
DIY Dollhouse Kitchen Tour | DIY Dollhouse Living Room & Dining Room Tour | DIY Dollhouse Bathroom Tour | DIY Dollhouse Reading Nook Tour
Dollhouse decorating is so much fun and a tiny bit addictive.
Questions? Comments? Leave them below, I’d love to hear what you think of my DIY Dollhouse Bedroom!
xo,
Jen
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