It’s been quite some time since I rearranged the doll room. When I was preparing the house for the sale photographs I regretfully packed up all my cloth dolls and some of the others to make the room seem less cluttered. The majority I left out because I didn’t want to put fragile old dolls in the garage for an extended period and because you can’t very well write a doll blog without dolls can you?

Over the past year several new dolls have joined the family and with the addition of Naomi’s vintage fashion dolls the shelves were becoming overcrowded. I started wondering if rearranging the shelves would solve the problem without me having to pack any away.

My original idea was to move the Barbies and Sindys to the middle shelves where I had been displaying my Nettas, small Pedigrees and other vintage vinyl dolls. I started to move them and found that I still didn’t have as much space as I needed for the Barbies. Plan B went into effect as I combined the overflow from that shelf with the shelf of dolls in formal wear. The Sindy’s ended up going back on their old shelf but in a different order which seemed to work better.

I had some drama with the Nettas. I had them all arranged on their new shelf but then I tried to add just one more doll and three of them nose-dived off the sheld bouncing off a box of Barbie shoe which of course spilled shoes onto the floor. I was not happy about that and I’m still not sure I found them all.

That should have been the end of the job but of course as I am a compulsive furniture rearranger I didn’t stop there.

There was a large wooden shelf unit in my hallway which had sat in the dining/computer room for years. I used it to display ornaments and store things in the lower drawers. When the room was painted and recarpeted the unit was emptied and put in the hallway where it has sat doing not much ever since. The things I had on it have either been moved or stored. I thought I might sell it but then I started to think that maybe I could use it in the doll room the way that I repurposed our old TV unit some years ago.

I did some measuring and decided that if I moved the desk the Tammy House sits on and a shelf unit I could make it fit. Well, you should have seen me on Sunday moving this six-foot long cabinet into the doll room by myself. When I want to shift stuff I just want to get on with it not wait until someone has time to come and help me.

So the shelves were moved into the hallway, the desk was shoved out of the way. I still had not figured out what to do with it. I was very pleased to find that the Dolly Mix dolls house would fit on the middle shelf. I would have liked to have put the Triang 61 there too but the gap was not wide enough. However, it looked just as nice sitting on top of the unit. I was able to fit my tin litho dolls house in next to the Dolly Mix and the box containing the Dreamhouse fitted perfectly on the bottom shelf.

I did wonder what to do with the Tammy House. I thought about putting it on top of the cabinet but I couldn’t lift it that high up as it is rather heavy. It probably wouldn’t have been very practical anyway as I’d have to stand on a ladder to use it. It ended up on another re-purposed piece of furniture next to the TV unit.

I was quite pleased with my work in the end. The Barbie’s now have two shelves and are arranged in approximately chronological order with vintage and reproduction vintage, mod era and seventies and early eighties dolls on one shelf and eighties to present day on the other one. I still have other fashion dolls both Barbie and non Barbie that I am not displaying at present. They are going to have to wait until we move.

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