Fast, Easy to Assemble Kit for a Dolls House Garden Scene
This quick and easy to assemble kit for a walled garden with an arbor is part of a new range introduced by Alex Zohar of Victoria Miniland. The Barb's Garden Kit can be used to make a stand alone display or easily added on to the side or rear of a dolls house or shop, cafe, pub or wine bar.
The kit comes with precut ready for assembly 3/8 inch mdf base and walls, two of which step up to create the walls of a square arbor in one corner of the garden. The pieces are precision cut and fit together snugly with predrilled holes and attached pegs. Pieces on my sample dropped easily into place with no persuasion necessary. A pre-glued arbor fits neatly into slots on the roof of the higher walls, and is supported on one corner by a post, which pegs into a stepped mdf base and one corner of the arbor. Two low walls with posts finish the piece, one of them is nicely detailed with turned railings and small railing caps, preglued in place. The overall size of the finished garden area is 16 inches wide by 12 inches deep by 10 inches high, giving you a lot of options for using this kit as a stand alone piece or with an existing scene.
The kit comes flat packaged and can be assembled in under ten minutes with no instructions necessary. For reference Alex has included a range of photos of the project with various finishes on his web site. To finish the kit you will need to supply glue to securely fix the mdf and wood part in place, and any garden and building details you wish to add to the structure.
Range of Finishing Options
As this kit is built from smooth finished mdf, with a very precise fit, you have a range of finishing options. You could use brick or tile papers for the walls, paint the mdf or texture it with a number of finishing products, including the excellent brick and stone stencils from Bromley Craft Products. The garden is arranged into two roughly equal sections, one beneath the arbor, and one beside it, giving you lots of space for raised flower beds, pots, or other structures in addition to finishing the arbor. There is a slight setback on the detailed front wall, so you have room to plant climbers or some wall supported plants along the outside front edge of your garden.
The stepped walls on either side of the arbor make a useful showcase for wall plants, bird houses, decorative tiles or other items, and help blend the arbor into larger scenes. One downside of the kit is that the arbor is designed to fit on the left side of the garden only if you use the pre drilled holes to fit your garden together. If you are prepared to drill a new set of holes for the dowelled walls, and fill and sand the back arbor wall to adjust the fit (which is a neat half lap join), you can reverse the design of the garden.
The finish of the kit sample I had for review is very good. The pieces are precisely cut and fitted, and there is little excess glue to clean off the wood sections if you wish to leave them with a wood finish. The posts that mark the front edges of the garden have a clean cut bit of vertical wood trim which can be given a wood finish as well.
Price and Availability
The kits are only available from Victoria Miniland . The package the garden comes in measures 12 inches by 16 inches by 2 1/4 inches approximately but the mdf parts are solid, so be sure to include the cost of shipping in your decision. I'm glad to see kits like this becoming available in North America as shipping costs from England to North America for similar items often make the cost of this more European style of kit prohibitively expensive.
Price $33 plus shipping.
