Current Conditions
26°F - SUNNY
"I was looking through magazines and saw that dollhouses were getting popular," Waddell said. That was about 10 years ago. "I decided to look into it. I didn't know what I was doing, but I would try."
He started trying to build a log cabin for his granddaughter, but it proved to be too difficult, he said.
Then he saw a Victorian-style three-story dollhouse kit. "I liked the shape of it," he said. After he bought it, he "found out there was a whole lot more to it" than he suspected. In fact, it took him five years to complete it.
After the kit was together, he had to learn to wallpaper the house. But before he got started, his wife, Anna Ruth, said she would like working lights in it, too.
"I found out you could either make furrows in the wall and run wire, or you could tape it. We went with tape and then hooked it up to a transformer," Waddell said. "I figured I knew everything I had to know, so I put up the wallpaper."
His wife decided to make rugs for the dollhouse. She measured the rooms and found a pattern at a dollhouse show to make counted cross-stitch rugs. "My wife had a lot of fun making the rugs," he said.
Waddell decided that if she was going to make the rugs, then he would have to put in flooring, strip by strip. In the kitchen, he put in linoleum.
"Then I found out that all of the lights didn't work," he said. "When I bought a lamp and put in a miniature outlet in the wall, some lit and some didn't."So he had to strip off some of the wallpaper to fix the problem.
He later discovered he could have left the wallpaper alone and tested the outlets with the wallpaper in place.
Waddell thought the dollhouse would look better with a porch on it, so he purchased a wrap-around porch kit.
"But it didn't quite fit, so I played with it," he said. "You could see under the porch, so I made some latticework for it."
To make it more realistic and to show off the porch, he added brick steps. He also "dirtied up" the top of the chimney, he said.
Waddell and his wife also had a lively discussion about the outside color of the house. "I wanted really gaudy paint (a style called Painted Lady). You can see who won," he said. The dollhouse is painted with pastel blues.
Furnishing the dollhouse also became a hobby all its own.
Waddell found a piano and decided he needed a music room. The house also has a game room with a pool table. For the bathroom, he found an old-fashioned tub, so he also needed to find an old-fashioned water closet type of toilet.
(112) (61) (11)"I wanted it to be as close to historically accurate as I could," he said.
Waddell, who had no previous woodworking skills, said putting the kit together was easy, but the "trim and electricity was a challenge."
The finished Victorian dollhouse was taking up room in their apartment and "collecting dust," and Waddell, 80, didn't want all that effort to go to waste. Therefore, he decided to donate it to Garden Spot Village's benefit auction.
Garden Spot's 12th annual festival and benefit auction will begin Saturday at 8 a.m. with a craft fair, bake sale, theme basket silent auction and preview of the benefit auction.
At 9 a.m., a harvest hayride will be available and the festival food court opens. At 1 p.m., the Garden Spot Village Band will play.
The benefit auction begins at 10 a.m. Besides Waddell's Victorian dollhouse, the auction will include quilts, wallhangings, bird woodcarvings and birdhouses, theater tickets, a sailboat ride and gift certificates.
The benefit auction also includes handcrafted furnishings, such as a cradle, a drop-leaf swing-leg table, a four-drawer sewing chest and a quilt rack, that were crafted in the Garden Spot Village woodshop from walnut trees that date back 210 years and were used in the construction of a barn that stood for 100 years on Garden Spot Village property.
Garden Spot Village is at 433 S. Kinzer Ave., New Holland. The auction benefits Garden Spot's benevolent fund.
