Urban Town Dollhouse: Assembly Tips

My tips for assembling the Urban Town dollhouse kit.

The Urban Town Dollhouse was designed by me and is sold here at Miniatures.com

Tools:

I reccomend:
Utility knife
Ruler
Square
Sandpaper (or palm sander if you want to be really speedy prior to any cuts being done)
Roller paint brush

*Small clamps are nice to have, and small pieces of wood to help flatten

Assembly:

I like to do a dry fit with my dollhouse so I know where everything goes.  I just use masking tape to hold it together temporarly.  Just be careful to not knock it over or dent anything.

Use a utility knife to square off any rounded corners on your floor grooves.  This way the walls will sit flush and meet completely at the edge.

I painted all my kit pieces Oxford White by Benjamin Moore.  It's a bright cool white.  (In previous houses I've used Alabaster by Sherwin Williams for a warmer look).  I made sure to label the pieces on the edges.  All my paint choices will be in the exterior finishes post next.

I used a Dremel Trio to make channels for my LEDs, it's a discontinued tool but Dremel has a new router attachment that fits the regular Dremel tool.  I will go more into detail about lighting and the steps to prep the dollhouse for it in it's own post.  For now, just make note, that this is the stage where you would do this step, before assembly.  A utility knife can also cut rough channels into the soft mdf.

TIP Use both bathroom walls to measure out the distance between the kitchen and the living room divider.  You can do this for the second floor as well to get a straight line.

I used Alene's tacky glue to adhere the entire kit together.  I placed heavy soup cans and work out weights on top.  In some cases a small clamp with a paint stir stick helped square the kit.  Also having a little square can be useful too for the interior walls.  I gave some time to dry between floors.

I decided to not glue in my bathroom door wall.  I sort of sanded off the top a bit so I could easily take it in and out after assembly.  (Mostly because I had to get the exterior done for a deadline for marketing purposes before I finished the interior.  But it did work well.)

Based on my experience, I suggest staining and adhering the pine flooring board sheets to both the 3rd floor roof and the 2nd floor roof overhang before assembling your dollhouse.  And on top of that, I personally did not glue my 3rd floor roof on until after all the dollhouse exterior finishes were complete.  This made painting the exterior paneling on the 3rd floor much simpler. 

Full Urban Town Dollhouse series posts:

Reveal

Making the Kit Behind the Scenes

Assembly

Exterior

Lighting

Interior