Project Doll's House: Summary of Measurements

After so much theory and thinking, maybe it is time to make a simple summary list of the elements we need to cut. If you trust your planning, you can now cut all at once, but maybe it is wise to cut and groove only some parts, and then see if everything fits, before cutting more.

However, we first need to finish some missing bits of the theory, we need to determine the overall height of the doll's house. Previously, we discussed the height of the rooms, and the roof-folding mechanism. All of this we need to put together now, in order to work out the height of side and rear walls.

First, let's decide here, that the ground plane will have 5 mm deep grooves to receive the side and rear walls.

The rear wall needs to cover two floors of 200 mm each, which we said should include the thickness of the floor element (9 mm), i.e. the free room height will be 191 mm. Thus two floors need 2 x 200 mm = 400 mm wall height. To this we need to add 11 mm as detailed earlier, and we need to add another 5 mm to account for the bit the wall will sink into the floor. Thus the rear wall will be 416 mm tall and, as determined previously, 782 mm - 2 x 7 mm = 768 mm wide (7 mm for grooves in both side walls).

The side walls are a bit more complicated, but let's first only cut out two rectangular pieces of wood, after which we will transfer the measurements of the roof-folding mechanism to these elements and cut out the details in another step. The side wall needs to have the same height as the rear wall up to the point, where the roof section starts, i.e. up to the place from where we will later make 45° cuts. Thus we know that the lower bit is 416 mm tall (see above). From the post about the roof-folding mechanism (drawing), we can see that the height above that line is 180 mm + 12.7 mm + 20 mm = 212.7 mm, which gives a total height of 628.7 mm. Previously we already worked out the width of the side wall to be 360 mm.

Now then, here's the list:

• Ground plane, 12-mm plywood, 420 mm x 842 mm (from here)
• Side walls, 12-mm plywood, 360 mm x 628.7 mm (2 pieces; see above)
• Rear wall, 9-mm plywood, 768 mm x 416 mm (see above)
• Floors, 9-mm plywood, 764 mm x 354 mm (from here)
• Internal walls, 9-mm plywood, 197 mm x 354 mm (from here)

Thus a practical approach is:

1. Cut ground plane, side walls, rear wall.
2. Make 5 mm deep grooves in ground plane for the outer walls, side walls 12 mm width, rear walls 9 mm.
3. Make grooves along the rear edges of the side walls, so that side and rear walls overlap as shown here.
4. Put it all together. This is always a motivating highlight. Repeat often.
5. If ok so far, copy the outline of the roof-folding mechanism onto the side walls, and cut out accordingly.
6. Put it all together.
7. Cut floors.
8. Make 3 mm deep grooves in side and rear walls for floors, make sure they align properly.
9. Put it all together.
10. Cut interior walls.
11. Make 3 mm deep grooves for interior walls.
12. Put it all together.

After all this you should have:

In the next post, I will show the build stages outlined here.

Design and photo: Thomas Ulich.