Inspiration: Honeymoon Horror House
Before
After
This house started out as a Hobby Lobby “Honeymoon Suite” kit. It is half-scale, or 1:24 scale, and came complete with materials to make furniture, lights, etc. It is a fun kit to build and really cute when you are done (I didn’t use any of the paper wall/floor coverings). But…we’re not here for cute! It’s always hard to take that first step and take something pretty and just trash it, but trash it we must.
The first thing I did was to install a real wood floor using thin coffee stirrers. Real wood floors not only add depth but when using coffee stirrers or Popsicle sticks the edges often don’t line up perfectly leaving shadows and gaps that help give the look of old worn out flooring. I glued the sticks directly to the floor of the model with Aileen’s Tacky Glue and “stained” them with watered down brown acrylic paint.
I decided to move the bathroom and install a mock-basement door should I later decide to add a basement to the model! Then it was just aging. I reused the plastic barrier pieces from the original shower and made a new shower enclosure and added lots of brown and black paint washes for mold and water damage as well as some green and purple spots for color.
This was my first quarter-scale miniature building and I have to say while the instructions where horrible, building and aging it was addicting. All-in-all it only took maybe 20 hours to do and it was a blast!
The (nearly) Finished Suite
My version of the Honeymoon Suite is only a little different from the original–really. I changed the bed into a broken 4-poster using some old 1:12 scale balusters, and added a foam mattress. I moved the bathroom to create a built in a shower-enclosure, used different fabric for the sofa (the “piping” is just the surged edge of the old tablecloth I used for the sofa fabric), and real cherry veneer on the coffee table top–that let me split a chunk or two out and I added some cup rings.
I still need to make a sink, bedding, add a few tchotchkes, a roof, lighting and people….or bodies anyway. I’ll update this page as the scene evolves!
The Bathroom
I must confess, this is one of my favorite rooms in this build. I particularly love the little green plant growing out of the drain!
The shower enclosure was made by repurposing the plastic walls that were meant for the original bathroom (I split one of them to make the open door/short wall). The shower head is made as per kit instructions. The floor is a piece of cereal box with the tile shapes scored in and a hole-punched drain. I hammered in an eyelet into the hole for the drain and added paint and lots of washes. It’s really that easy and so much fun to paint!
The toilet itself is included with the kit, I just added some staining.
The Hallway
A great place hang out with a friend…but my favorite part here is the curtain. The kit comes with a white piece of this pleated tulle but I used a scrap piece of black that a friend gave me. the Tulle makes fabulous holes if you stab at it with a dull X-acto knife (kids, let your parents do this and then you can laugh at them when they stab themselves…ask me how I know…).
I am hoping to add a backlit person/shadow at the window in the near future.
