First photo of my Triang house

The first photo of my Triang house, taken when I was 3 1/2 (with white band in my hair).

Not a great photo (too dark) but it does show the wallpaper my grandfather used, and the grand piano (sadly lost).

Two delighted little girls get to know the Triang house

My triang dollshouse

My husband is busy scanning my late mother's large collection of slides which we brought to England at the beginning of last year. He uses his laptop and a very good nikon slide scanner so can sit watching tv while doing this task. I have been spotting some gems from my early childhood and this evening the first photo of my Triang house appeared on the screen. It must have been taken just after my grandfather presented it to us because it shows our evident delight. I do actually remember this, even though I was only 3 1/2 years old at the time. I can clearly recall watching him rebuild the house in my dad's garage workshop when I peered through the window. He had brought it overseas to us flat-packed in his suitcase, having taken it apart carefully - so we inherited mum's childhood toy 6,000 miles from where she played with it.

I realise on looking at my other posts of this house that the photos I've taken are not that great, my photography skills have improved since I started this blog, so I need to take some better ones.

I will publish the slide photo as soon as I can on the blog (it is still on the laptop, to be backed up later tonight). It shows the grand piano which was later lost or broken by two small girls (my sister was not quite 2 when we got the house) and some of the doll family we had then. Just one photo but a great little record of a special gift which helped to set me on course for a lifetime hobby.

Big and little house moving

Since returning from the SA adventure the dolls and us have had a hectic time because we moved house 2 weeks ago.  Not far, but everything still needed to be packed up and with the amount of stuff we'd accumulated after 18 years in one home (including the addition of 2 daughters, 3 dolls houses, lots of play dolls,  as well as my husband's hobby things) this was a mammoth task in less than a week.  Our former neighbour kindly allowed us to put the dolls houses in her spare bedroom so we didn't have to move them with everything else, but I made sure all the doll family came in our car rather than the large removal van.

Since the move we've been very busy unpacking boxes (we have approximately 2,000 beloved books), flooring the loft, putting up beds and finding places for things in our new home, so it wasn't until Sunday afternoon that we were finally able to go and collect the dolls houses and put them into their new positions.  The Triang has gone in my younger daughter's bedroom, so that her Christmas expanded Polly Pocket collection is able to make the most of it, Mrs Harvey's shop has gone into my elder daughter's bedroom and my unfinished Greenleaf Westville now lives on its special table in our bedroom.  As yet the 2 larger dolls houses are unfurnished, as we've got further decorating to do to the full size house so there is no point unpacking things only to put them away again soon afterwards.  But having the Westville in my bedroom is a constant gentle reminder that I started building that house about 21 years ago and it is about time I finished it!  However for the past couple of nights tiling the full sized bathroom has been my main focus and I'm rather tired tonight, so the Westville will have to wait a bit longer before I can give it my attention.

We've got the TV set up so haven't missed an episode of Dancing on Ice since it started 3 weeks ago, and nor have the play dolls!  What is more there is a new addition with skates to the play doll line up and he belongs to me. I'll keep you guessing though, as I haven't taken photos of him yet.

Childs play

Yesterday we had some friends come to visit us for the first time.  We hadn't seen them for a while and it was good to get to know the children a little as the dads talked about their musical common interest and I chatted with their mum.

My younger daughter brought out the marble run and a biscuit tin filled with glass marbles and in no time at all the two boys (aged 9 and 8) and their little sister (aged 4) were rolling marbles around our rug, creating pictures with them and inventing games.  My 14 year old girl was very happy to get involved in this creative play (it made a nice change from GCSE homework!).

After a while I brought down the Triang dollshouse for the 4 year old and my 6 year old to play with (she was shown the 1/12th scale houses but was told they were for looking at) and they had great fun rearranging furniture and making up stories with the motley collection of dolls (old and new) which inhabit the house.

As they were leaving the 3 elder children rearranged our fridge poetry magnets and laughed as the silly sentences they made up from the collection of kitchen and garden words.

During the two hours they were with us, there was never a cross word, no arguments or fighting, just happy enjoyment.  I'm under no illusions, I know there could easily have been disagreements, it was just a pleasure to see them talking and getting to know each other whilst they played with some old fashioned toys.

Close ups of inside the Triang House

I realised that the photos I posted of my earliest dollshouse are not very close up. They were taken over 25 years ago with a very simple camera and were the closest I could get without blurring the images. Now that I have a rather better, digital camera, I have tried experimenting with taking close up photos of some of the furniture in situ, though the photos still aren't great but do give some idea.

Bedroom with beds over quilted!

You will see from these photos that the layout of the bedroom has changed a bit. In the earlier photos, there were plenty of little inhabitants of the house, and they all needed beds. The Triang house is very cramped (it was one of my earliest desires to enlarge it, I dreamed of a staircase) and for a family this size, bunk beds were necessary. The earlier photo has reminded me that I actually made a simple bunk out of pieces of wood in my father's garage (where the house had been reassembled by my grandfather some years before), and I now realise why the two remaining beds have so many quilts - because I made quilts for all 3 bunk levels of the rather chunky bed which no longer survives.

In the bedroom, the two beds and the bureau came with the house when my grandparents brought it over, I assume they were the furniture that my mother owned. I adored the bureau as it is lined with red inside the top for the writing desk, and the drawers really come out and in. My sister once found a tiny white feather and we poked this in a bead for the inkstand, to fit the writing desk. The beds and bureau are nicely made of plywood. I bought the wardrobe in an antique shop in Bath during a visit to England in 1985, along with the little bedside table. The jug and bowl were made by fay of Cape Town, there is a similar green one in the sitting room. These items delighted me as a child. Also upstairs is the ancient lead bath, which as you will see from the photos is very scratched, revealing the lead.

The detail of the bath also made it special
to me despite the fact that lead isn't a safe material for a plaything.

In the sitting room are the original chairs that came with the house (re-covered by me), along with the fireplace and coal scuttle, which are made of metal (cast iron I think). These are truly lovely and detailed and I am so relieved we didn't lose them when we were small (though I notice the central bar of the fireplace is broken off), like we did the black plastic (but very elegant) grand piano that my grandparents brought over with a little lamp when the house was rebuilt. They also brought a family of 4 dolls, sadly long since lost. I subsequently bought lots of little plastic baby dolls with sweet faces and moving limbs from the local shop, I've still got these, but they are currently in storage, so I can't photograph them.

The fireplace and coal scuttle - if you can help identify the maker
of these, I'd be very pleased.

The red piano is the treasured replacement for the plastic grand, as my mother visited England without us in 1981 and brought back a collection of items for the dollshouse, including the new standard lamp and the wonderful piano with a lift up lid and smart little stool. The grandfather clock is actually a pencil sharpener cover, but is nicely to scale for this house and seemed to fit the other furniture in this room.

The red piano with the yellow plastic telephone,
and the green jug and bowl by fay.

My earliest dollshouse

My first dollshouse was actually shared with my sister, but somehow it was me who played with it more. It had in fact belonged to my mother when she was a little girl, and my grandfather took it to pieces and brought it overseas to us when I was about 4 years old. I can clearly remember watching him re-assemble it on the workbench in the garage, which had a convenient window overlooking the back garden, so I could tiptoe and peek in to see what my grandfather was doing. My grandparents had brought over some of the original furniture, and some new items for us, some of which inevitably got broken by small girls. My grandfather even took the trouble to run three lightbulbs on wires through the wood floors/ceilings to provide lights in the three rooms of this Triang house, the battery pack was hidden under the base of the house.

The house took a lot of knocks from two little girls and our friends, and after about 10 years of hard play, was sadly a bit worse for wear, even though very loved. So as a teenager, I did my best to restore it, which included giving it a new plywood roof, repapering and repainting. I didn't do a great job, but it was the best my existing skills could manage - I learned a lot in the process, and went on to build three simple dollshouses out of MDF which I sold, restored one that my cousin had played with, and built a smaller house as well which I also later sold.

Some years later when I had moved to the UK, I had the Triang house shipped back - so it travelled 12,000 miles altogether. It is now in my elder daughter's bedroom but is only occasionally played with now, as she has a larger house of her own. Maybe my little one will play with it soon.

The Triang house after I had repainted it. I wouldn't use gloss paint now, paint a horrible black line around the (original) flowers, nor would I use that large patterned wallpaper, but with supplies where the house was at the time very limited, I did the best I could with what was available. I made the little patchwork quilts for the beds - they really are separate squares sewn together.

I have not done anything else to the house since then - Triang houses in original condition are not worth millions, and this house shows its history of being loved and played with, which was the intention for Triang dolls houses.

This is the shell of one of the 3 houses I built to sell, when an older teenager. My dad's factory cut the main pieces to size from a larger sheet I bought, then I chizelled out all the windows and doors, because I didn't have a jigsaw. I did some woodworking classes after I made the dolls houses! I had fiddled around with bits of wood and tools in the garage for years, so had some basic skills.

Here is one of the houses, all painted up (I think this was the first one I made)

This is inside that house.

This is one of the other houses all painted up.

Inside that house