Note: Before you go on, let me just say this is a very detailed and long-winded review of the progress. Pics are placed in-between paragraphs.

Let me share the first view of the kids room. ^^ The idea was to make it the most colorful and playful room in the house. It's supposed to make its occupants feel happy and welcome at all times.

The above pic doesn't include the table that is in the middle of the room, I removed it so it doesn't block out the lovely white display shelf on the pic. ^^

The beginnings
When I started looking for items for the house my desire was to have pretty wallpaper to decorate it with. During Xmas (2005) and New Year season it was fiendishly difficult to locate any giftwrap paper that wasn't either sparkly, see-through or had typical holiday motifs like snowmen, Santas and Xmas trees. *laugh* I was tearing out my hair in frustration! What a bad season to start decorating dollhouse walls, hahaha. *_*

Well, with color combinations in mind I looked further without luck for quite some time, when I finally spotted a few rolls of lovely wrapping paper in a bookshop. In the following weeks I bought several more different papers because I knew I'll probably change my mind and restyle the rooms sometime and it's better to be prepared.

What I had in mind were different colors/patterns for different walls. Not all the walls in one room would be the same and I went for at least two styles for each room, to make it look more colorful. I also had to think of how the floors would look like. All the rooms should be in a different color combination. When I was buying wallpaper, I always thought of this first - whether the pattern/color actually matched the others that were supposed to be in the room. Once I decided on the colors, it wasn't hard to pick the wallpaper that was available.

The kids room for Liccas includes a blue make-up table and footed ottoman chair, white/green display shelf, green open armoire shelf, red bunk bed and white side table with shelves below and an attached 'writing' board above.

The main wallpaper has funky and retro disco dots and was the most fun wallpaper I've ever found around here. It's impossible to find any really awesome stuff but this really topped my other findings and I was so happy to have spotted it. ^^ They had just one left, too! On the two side walls there is real wallpaper you'd use in a real house. It has a pink argyle pattern with cute yellow crowns here and there. Definitely for kids.

The floor is vanilla-colored with darker spots that make it look like real flooring which is cool! It's realllyyyyy thin paper and I had to be extra careful not to wrinkle it to much when I glued it on. For this I used the kind of glue you use for real wallpaper - you mix the powder with water and it turns into a sticky substance, almost like jelly. Out of fear of wallpaper starting to fall off if it wasn't glued on tightly, I picked strong glue like this instead of glue you'd normally use for office or school work.

You let it harden a bit and then apply it on the walls (shelves in my case) with a large brush. Because gift wrap is very thin, it was very hard to glue on sometimes (it would always stick where I didn't want it to) and if you overdid it with the glue, the wetness would sift through and make the walls look blotchy. o.o Luckily most of the imperfections like that dried off and the walls looked fine in the end.

Before I applied the glue to the shelves, I first measured all the walls to see how much paper I needed to cut. I'd have one room finished in one evening, then it took me weeks and weeks to find the right wallpaper to start on the next. I didn't want to rush and just glue on whatever I had at the time... I knew I'd be taking it off if I spotted a better piece later. So I took it slow and besides, there was no need to rush. ^o^ Sometimes I had one wall completed and the rest of the room was bare, while two other rooms were completely finished, etc. It took me quite a while. It's mostly due to the bad selection of wallpaper in my town.

When the wallpaper was up and I was all excited to position the furniture I've bought so far, some pieces obviously didn't fit color-wise. The cafe was always supposed to be in red, so I knew I had to buy red wallpaper for the red furniture and that was that. That one was the easiest. The kids room was much trickier because when you have so many colors, some of them ought to clash. The Barbie My Scene furniture I bought for this room wasn't colorful at all but more in living room style, brown and beige! Ack, I thought, what do I do now? Either I have a sad-looking kids room in BROWN TONES that few children would like, which would also mean switching the retro dots wallpaper (nooooo) and the pink wallpaper, OR I leave the wallpaper as it is and just repaint the damn furniture! Bhahahah! This sounded much more fun indeed.

See the BEFORE and AFTER pic below of the left corner in the room. Click for bigger versions.

It's the dark brown open armoire shelf and the bigger, beige display shelf. While the wallpaper was a bit different before (but still turquoise like the new retro dots), the brown and beige obviously didn't go well with it. I've been looking at the room for weeks before realizing what's "wrong" with it. It wasn't the style of the furniture (a bit Victorian, isn't it?) because that stlye does work in a children's room... It just has to be in the right color! Of course, I thought, it's the color I need to change.

As the pics show, I spraypainted over the two pieces with canned acrylic paint in green and white. The furniture pieces are both from a Barbie boutique originally. The dark brown piece turned into a fun frog green one and the beige display shelf's new color is white. I also repainted the handles of the drawers green and switched the pink boutique background wall with a green one. The old one had bags, purses and shoes pictured on it because it was meant for a boutique setting *lol*. Wouldn't make sense in a kids room. I never like those backgrounds on Barbie furniture and always replace them with my own. More on that below.

The green armoire now holds various toys (I'll post close-ups some other time, there's still much to post!), phone, mirror, cds, juice bottles, sunglasses, etc. On the pink wall behind it are posters of Legolas from Lord of the Rings, paintings of sunflowers and a dog and a Natalie Portman calendar (Padme on STAR WARS). I removed the Neo from the Matrix poster, I think I'll use it somewhere else.

The two shelves look great together now and with that in mind I also bought another Barbie piece that was already partly in green. Click for bigger version.

It's a side table with a board and nice "compartments" and extra 2 shelves. The board again had a pink sturdy wallpaper that looked boring and was nondescript, and I just removed it and placed crisp yellow backing there instead. It gives the room even more color.

Zoom (Click for bigger version).

On the board I glued little poster thingies I printed on nice quality photo paper. I just made them very small in a graphics program first. ^o^ The white on the right is a Momoko doll picture from the official site - I always loved that outfit! Over it is a drawing an online friend gave me for my B-day. Another two resized Jenny doll "postcards" I lifted off the web were added. ^^

On the left is a nice 'Coordinates' photo of a Volks Who's That Girl? doll (GORGEOUS DOLLS), an Ewan McGregor holding a Happy Birthday sign that I got from another online pal, a little blue teaser poster for the first Harry Potter movie (Harry and Hagrid walking) and a red poster of a Takara Kisara doll with short hair. ♥

I did the same with the Natalie Portman calendar mentioned above... I resized and printed out the "cover" - it's for December 2005 - and glued on several sheets in the back so it looks thicker and as if each month is represented like it would on a real calendar. Same with the Legolas poster and the other stuff. ^^ Resized and printed on glossy paper.

On the table are the little toys that are the actual reason I'm posting this *laugh* because I'm so happy to have them! They're little gashapon/capsule toys from Japan. The violet cactus is so cool! The green horse is RODY, also Japanese. I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE RODY!!! It took me ages to find a miniature one that would fit in my dollhouse! ^^ He's just 3 cm (1 1/4 inch) tall. I picked a green one because I knew he'll match other green parts of the kids room! RODY is a very popular toy in Japan. *must get more*

There's also a cute sparkly miniature book that's actually a tiny address book for girls and when I saw it a while back in a store, I thought how awesome it would look on the doll's table here. You snap it close with a yellow button it has on the cover. My fave part is the pink bell dangling on the chain!

In the two "compartments" below is a nice button pin ("I ♥ TO PARTY") and little doujinshi comics I again resized in a graphics program and printed out and then stapled together a few pages so they can be "read". I did this for about 40 doujinshi, I think! My Liccas read doujinshi just like me. *laugh* They're little copies of actual doujinshi I own or of my wishlist doujinshi... Or just any doujinshi that had cool-looking covers. The one you can see the most clearly (next to the SpongeBob pirate figure *lol*) has Ed from FullMetal Alchemist on the cover. I don't read/watch this series but the cover looked nice, so I used it. My dollies obviously read it, as well as some oldies like Gundam Wing and Card Captor Sakura, and Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, STAR WARS and many others.

Well, I said I love gashapon and here's more (their expressions are brilliant):

In the back I put up the teaser poster of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban movie. "HAVE YOU SEEN THIS WIZARD?" is one of my fave HP posters. How could I resist putting Sirius up? *laugh* I also added some sports stickers.

The gashapon I like the most on the current market are those in form of animals or creatures or just cute unusual things, not the anime and computer game figurines that are more popular. I like less familiar gashapon. Oh, how I wish to walk down a Tokyo street and throw coins in a capsule machine and get some of these out! I'm always on the lookout for more toys for my dollhouse. It's not exactly easy to find miniature toys. *sigh*

Next to the gashapon there's another button pin (Union Jack, "Punk's not dead"), two more doujinshi and a pink flower necklace. On the bottom shelf on the left I put a miniature perfume bottle I've kept since I was in my early teens and never knew what to do with it... Well, it looks perfect there! A little sheep is standing next to it and a little further away a little cow. The rest are all gashapon. So, soooo awesome! No one makes toys as cool as the Japanese.

The pink duck on the make-up table was bought in a nice art & hobby store here in my town. I often find pretty things there that I can use in my dollhouse. When I get better make-up and perfume bottles and other such things to put there, I'll post close-ups of the make-up table, too. *thinks of Re-ment miniatures*

When I started working on the kids room, the red bunk bed was always meant for Liccas or EB-minis because it definitely doesn't fit bigger dolls. I didn't want to buy a Barbie-sized bed, usually at least 31 cm (12 1/2 inch) long to fit most 1/6 dolls, because it would take up too much space. Why have a bed that's too big for the kids anyway? It was difficult to find a bed that was for smaller dollies but I managed to snatch one on eBay (very overpriced) in an ugly hot pink color which I then spraypainted red, as you can see. Much better! The bunk bed is 25.5 cm (10 inch) long, just enough for a Licca or EB-mini. It's a very pretty bunk bed complete with a ladder to reach the upper bunk.
I'm resewing the bed covers and pillows right now, that's why you can't see them. ^^

Well, time to finish up this extremely long Part I. Hope you liked it!

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