Oh, Pat, I do wish I could see them all.  I just love dioramas!  By-the-way, spray painting the plastic furniture is not too difficult, especially if they are the gloria sets that come unassembled.

Robin

 Pat Hawkins <jhawkins1320@charter.net> wrote:

Does anyone have an ideas for getting more room for our dolls? I am getting
"shelved out."
We all have that problem no matter how much room we have. My big room was once 2 small bedroons & now measures approx. 12 ft.X 22 ft. My problem is that I love to do scenes so I take up a whole shelf with my idea ;& then am lucky to be able to fit 3 or 4 dolls in the scene to people it . I just finished redoing the dolls kitchen , I had a great set of apppliances with cabinets et al. from dolls other than Barbie, but like Barbie 's stuff these were all Pepto Bismo pink...thought I'd get around to painting them but the way they are made, it would be hard to get in all the crooks & crannies. Then I got the brillainat idea of actually Using my Kitchen Little appliances instead of saving them in the box, for what? to sell one day...I never can sell things & when my DIL saw how much room these would take up , she begged me not to give it to my grand daughter ( who already has other Barbie sets I've given her & is careless & messy & Id hate to see these all thrown together in a box like she has everything else) These appliances are mostly white & I can live with the bit of pink & lav. trim. I finally got to use all the little bits of Kitchen Little foods etc. & leave the fridge door opened to display with a doll to side as tho making a decision what to get out...and to use plates, silverware bits of stuff collected over the years. But I really went all out in the dining room which has that nice cream colored Sindy furniture by Marx of some years ago. I used real wallpaper in a small pattern & a Xmas orn. chandalier hangs from the ceiling & all the fancy silver, dinnerware, vases plants etc. I've collected forever , can finally be displayed. So much stuff in these 2 rooms tho , it was hard to fit in 4 dolls .

My doll room is lined with shelves & every inch is in use. So when I ran out of wall space ,I moved to the middle of the floor placed a deep (about 16- 18 in.) but short ( approx. 30 in.tall) bookcase in the middle of the floor, with a desk about the same size next to it & put Barbie's older sprawling dollhouse ontop of it, which gets peopled by sev. dolls & furniture. The space in the desk drawers is filled with doll stuff, papers, measuring tapes, pencils that I need for my ideas. This is at one end of the room, you get just about 18 in. of space to walk around it..not a good thing if a person is large or worse, clumsy ( men usually take one look at my obstacle course & turn around & walk out )... At the other end of the room , I placed cabinets with doors, back to back, forming a U shaped area at end of the room & coming into about 6 ft of the 12 ft. wide room. In this U shape nook I made sort of a closet & store things such as doll books , paperdolls art suppies & sewing stuff, dolls or other things not ready for viewing & this is not seen until you go way back there to it . The cabinet & bookcase on the other side of my makeshift closet is crammed filled with dolls that can be seen.
I've been going thru all these dolls & assess., gave some away at Xmas time to the'Angel tree' we have at church & slowly give various things to my grandchildren ( don't want to give their parents a heart attack or overwhelm the child) or others. But not a dent has been made. I've been good about slowing down on buying dolls...didn't get any for Xmas, but gave up when I saw things on sale after.
My whole point was, when the edges of your room is filled , go to the middle Pat H