Thinking of Building a Dollhouse?

Have you ever been in the dollhouse kit market?  Have you ever noticed how many "unfinished" dollhouses you can score online?  Does the fact that there are so many unfinished dollhouses give you pause?  Well, it didn't stop me.  I seem to have the overly optimistic outlook, or I believe that everyone else is an idiot and I will succeed where so many others have failed.  And, inevitably, I figure it out; making a dollhouse is a major pain in the bazumpa. 

I purchased my dollhouse kit with idealistic, soft-lit visions of my daughter and me working on it together.  We would share the creation of it, smiling and making eye contact in slow motion, and we'd treasure the memories forever.  It would be part of my own personal drug commercial montage.  In reality, I haven't let her do anything except paint the roof, and the most vivid memory she may have of the process is when I strung together the F-word with BS in front of her this morning.  I asked her not to touch it while the glue dries and she proceeded to "walk" her new plushy friend through the front door.  F-ing BS!

So, as someone who has experienced the joy of building something like this "together", let me just give you this one little piece of advice: DON'T.  It will fall apart.  You will wallpaper the wrong walls.  You will get splinters and none of it is fun.  Not even the finished product is satisfying because everytime you look at it you see the crooked walls and the glue blobs and all the other flaws.  And the thing is so fragile there is absolutely no way that you would allow a child to play with it.  Oh, heavens, no.

Perhaps someday, far in the future, she and I will gaze at it from the couch, a mug of coffee in our manicured hands, while the next generation plays with it.  Sun will stream through the window, making our blown-out hair glow like halos, and we'll think of the days when we built it together.  Until then, I'm hating every minute of it.