How To Make A Doll Room Out Of A Box—Part One

We’re back from our March hiatus and ready to get crafting! So today we’re going to make a doll-sized craft room for Cedar Wood using a decorative box from Michaels!

I LOVE these cute book-shaped boxes!

I have several and use them to hold some of my craft supplies and doll accessories. This particular box is one that I bought a while back for holding scrapbook paper.  But it’s starting to show some wear (you can see one of the corners has been torn) so I’ve decided the time has come to repurpose it.

So now it is going to be a room for… Cedar Wood!

The inside of the box measures about 13″ high by 10″ wide (perfect for an Ever After High doll!) and, since Cedar Wood likes crafting, I plan to turn this into an arts and crafts themed room, and the first thing I’m going to make is the floor.

Supplies Needed For The Floor:

1. Cardboard
2. Scissors (or an Exacto knife) to cut the cardboard
3. A large roll of decorative tape or scrapbook paper
4. Two wire paper clips
5. Glue

For the floor, you will need to measure out a piece of cardboard that will fit inside your box.  I did this by laying my box face down onto the cardboard, then tracing around it and cutting along the lines.

Test the cardboard to see how it fits:

Hmmm….not quite.

I’m going to keep trimming the sides until the cardboard can be easily slipped in and out:

Better!

Now we need to make the cardboard look like a floor. This can be done using scrapbook paper or even decorative tape such as Washi tape or even duck tape.

For this floor, I am going to use a wood grained Washi tape.

Cover both sides of the cardboard piece and the bottom of your box with the tape or scrapbook paper:

Now you have a wood floor for your doll’s room!This works great just as it is, but I’d like to take things one step further and attach the floor to the box so it won’t fall out every time I open the lid.  But I also need to attach the floor in such way that it doesn’t stop the box lid from closing. So I’m going to use paper clips to make a floor that can be folded down for play and folded back up for easy storing.

To create the fold-out floor, all you need are two paper clips and a little school glue. Unbend the paper clips and cut them at the bend on each side.This will leave you with two, thin pieces of wire.

Next, make a small hole in the side of the box (you can even use the paper clip to do this). Put a dab of glue on one end of the cut paper clip and push it into the cardboard–just make sure the wire doesn’t poke through!  Once one end of the paper clip is in cardboard, put some glue on the other end and push it into the box where you made the hole.  Do this to both the right and left sides of the box.  Also, it’s okay if you have to bend the floor slightly to get the ends of the paper clip inside the holes.  After inserting the paper clips set the box and its new floor aside to let the glue dry.

In the end, you should have something that looks like this:I think it looks pretty darn neat and I love that the floor is now part of the box, yet doesn’t interfere with the closing the lid.

Be sure to check back next week because now we can start decorating the inside of Cedar’s new home!