My first dollhouse.

For Christmas in 1959 my parents hand built my sister Vickie and I a doll house.  Every piece was hand cut and hand built.  My father took regular house shingles and cut them down to scale to fit the little doll house.  Dad used balsa wood to make the moldings on the windows, and anywhere else small wood was needed.  He even wired the house for electricity.  There were these little tiny lights that actually turned on that my parents found and installed.  It even had a doorbell that worked.  My mother searched high and low for contact paper that looked like bricks for the outside of the house and tiles for the kitchen and bathroom floors inside the house.  My father built the stairs that went to the second floor, the doors, windows and furniture.  They even found plastic to put into the windows.  My mother sewed curtains and hung them up.

The living room and bedrooms had carpet in them that my parents made from carpet remnants.  My mother made some of the original furniture coverings such as the bed spread.  My parents were quite creative.  In the above photo I am kneeling down to play inside the house.  In the photo to the right you can barely see my grandmother Hazel to the left in the background and my aunt Jeanette to the right in the background.  You see the front of the dollhouse to the right in foreground of the photo and Vickie sitting on the left and me on the right.  Who knows what we were looking at, I am sure another gift we were opening.