Make Custom Dollhouse Scale Doors, Windows, Stairs and Other Building Parts

Use this tutorial to learn to make opening casement or awning windows, or fixed windows for a range of scale model buildings and dolls houses. The windows use thin plastic glazing and a 'sandwich' system of construction which allows them to be built with strip wood or heavy card, and common hand tools. Special mouldings or a router are not required.

The easiest windows to make for dollhouses and model buildings are windows which you fit directly into openings in the walls. This method uses stripwood and plexiglass, or acrylic, to make cusom flat windows with a range of designs.

Full glass doors are easily made from stripwood and perspex or plexiglass (lexan) in most dollhouse scales. The instructions for this door also show the steps to hinge the door with pins and place it in a door frame with a transom window above. This method of making a glass door uses regular stripwood and does not require the use of special mouldings or routered edges.

This door is made with the same 'sandwich' technique as the windows, so it can be built without use of a router or special mouldings. The half window style lends itself to a divided panel base which is how this door is constructed.

This system for making doors, like the windows, can use craft stripwood, or card depending on the scale of the doors you are making. With card you can make the doors for buildings 1:48 scale or smaller.

Flat column finishes for shop fronts and traditional interiors are easily made from a range of scrapwood pieces and regular moldings. Choose your trims and style, and assemble columns to fit any scale of model building.

Bevelled panels are easy to make in miniature scales and they can be used on everything from dolls house doors and wainscoting , to tiny kitchen cabinets. This method shows how to make them from stripwood using a sanding block.

This is a technique that can give you a range of ways to customize doors and walls for various period styles.

You can use layers of foamcore board covered with air dry clay to make faux stone stairs for model scenes, or a staircase for your fairy tale castle. As they are made from foam core board in the correct thickness for scale stairs, little measuring is required, and you can set up half circular stairs or a spiral set of stairs just by stacking the layers of foam, making each step an equal distance back from the step below it. Lightweight stairs like this are easily moved, making them ideal for front opening dolls houses, where they can be set in front of the house and moved when you want to open the doors.

You can build domes for most scales of model buildings using these simple techniques. The domes are shaped over a form using air dry clay or plaster over a base. Bases can be bowls, balloons or other easy to find rounded shapes, allowing you to make custom domes for almost every size of model building or dolls house. You can set the domes on top of flat roof buildings, or use them on pillars to make garden pergolas.