This is the latest project - a Lundby house from the late fifties or from the beginning of the sixties, I don't really know! I had to crawl into a container to get it. The stairs were missing and the floor was sagging, but it certainly had potential!

These pictures are from the restauration - what it looked like in the beginning and forward on.

The kitchen

....looks awful, the wallpaper is torn and dirty, the door has white spots and the floor is sagging and dirty. Actually I made some of the spots on the door myself; I forgot to protect the door when I painted the exterior.

Adjusting the floor

The first big job was to adjust the sagging floor. I accomplished that by making two sturdy wooden strips that I pressed upwards between the base boards on the house. The strips raised the floor one centimeter. It was time to fix the staircase.

Painting the living room floor downstairs

Working with pigment colours, I mixed a rather dark colour for the floor, red/brown with some black and some yellow ochre and painted the floor. Then I dragged a sturdy comb in the wet paint to give an illusion of wooden boards and at last; a very thin brush dipped in water took some of the colour away in thin, uneven lines. This made a few particularly ugly spots go away.

The staircase

.....is mended. I didn't solve the problem with water stains on the parchment banisters but they are almost invisible. We also need a small piece of wood underneath the left post and the post upstairs needs to be straightened.

The door

The doors, made of laminated wood were unharmed but very worn and stained. Unfortunately I was so eager to paint the ceilings that I forgot to tape the doors to their frames. The became clean and glossy with some oil.

Wallpaper

The hunt for wallpaper from the 50s was on. The first attempt to photograph the original paper and import it into Photoshop failed; it became blurred in the edges (right wallpaper) and it was difficult to tile. Then I found a jpg to tile (to the left). Too bad you can't see the pattern, it is very nice =). Perhaps I can make a kitchen floor in green and yellow to imitate the kitchen floor of my childhood...

Wallpaper

The summer is gone, it is time to continue with the house from the 50s. Wallpaper has been a problem, I am no printies' person, the paper is too soft to work with.

I found a real wallpaper from the 50s in a flea market. Miniature pattern! Tested glues and found out that for me, the best glue was the one you normally use for weave tapestry...

Since I want the bathroom to look like the one in my childhood (small, plain, white and Spartan) I need to find something suitable for tiles.

Bathroom half ready - not good!

This is not the right bathroom furniture but it is hard to find old bathroom furniture from that age to Lundby. This will, however, do for the present being =)

The sanitary ware belonging to a Lundby doll house are bought glued to a piece of masonite board and I am certain I have one more somewhere with a towel hanger, but I can't find it right now.

The floor is still a mystery, what can I use? I smart way to make white tiles - but how? White cardboard with a drawn pattern is not the best solution, I guess, but what?

The bathroom is ready

The black tiles come from black plastic that you get from the stores with delicatessen. I just put some putti in the incisions. I found the sanitary wares in Denmark. By the way - why do you find such a lot of blue and orange Lundby kitchen from the first doll houses everywhere, but almost no bathroom parts? A mystery!

The floor is cardboard with varnish, the shelf is made of thick, red plastic in an awsom shade. The stool is made from wood and metal thread with plastic wrapping. The cabinet is foam core, painted yellow. The lamp is hard to see but it is made from a curtain hook in plastic and the globe is transparant hard plastic from a package.

The bathroom mat is gorgeous - an old glasses case from the 50s - black, white and red.

The kitchen is shaping up

Four red, red chairs (no. 2520 from the Lundby catalogue 1967) did the trick in the kitchen. Ok, it is not from the fifties but, as I see it, perhaps they built the house in the fifties and have lived there for 10 years?

The flower boxes are from Denmark, the plastic curtain is a a piece of shelf edging I found on a flea market. The kitchen table is
covered with Perstorp tiles (a very tough material they used on the table tops in Sweden in the fifties) and the pattern is called virrvarr. Not so hard to find - I just photographed our elevator.

I have to redo the floor sometimes. In my eagerness to use Perstorp tiles, the squares became too small. One of the top cupboard was glued on the wall when I found the doll house, the other was a sorry mess from my daughter's childhood and it had to be renovated.

Upper hall

It probably should have been a bedroom but I owned a lot of sofas and no beds so here we are...

The sofas were made by my sister a long time ago and the thick rya rug was last year's christmas gift from my niece.

The book shelf is a tooth brush stand I begged from the store and provided with black shelves. The table was made by my and I really really tried to make it look like a teak wood table from the 50s. I failed, of course, wood is just not my material...

Living room downstairs

After several redecorations, I'm finally satisfied - this will do for the moment...The carpet is sown by hand (my niece) and the small hand-loom is made from matches and sewing-thread

Living room downstairs 2

Behind the stairs my pride and joy; german steel furniture from the 30s. I've seen furniture exactly like them in Kulturen, our museum. Flemish tapestry on the floor and a handmade print in black and yellow.