How to make a Barbie dreamhouse

Countdown the Christmas:

A series of DIY projects
and holiday inspirations.

With Christmas around the corner, I want to share the Barbie Dreamhouse my friend Kim and I collaborated on a couple Christmases ago. I’ve blogged about it elsewhere previously, but I’m so in love with the finished results of this project I had to show it off here. I have boys, so there probably won’t be any DIY Barbie Dreamhouses in my near future.

Kim wanted to give her then 5-year-old twins a Barbie dream-house for Christmas, but didn’t want to break the bank on something that might break easily. With four kids, she knows delicate a plastic dollhouse with lots of little parts and pieces wouldn’t last long. So we embarked on a shopping adventure to find the right tools to build our own, sturdier version.

Originally, we were thinking we would make over a bookshelf, but then we found this storage cube shelf and it was already pink! Normally, $50-$60 for one of these bad boys, we walked on a $20 sale at Fred Meyer. Plus we had an extra 15 percent off coupon for housewares. The shelf is perfect because it already has build-in room dividers. It’s simple with lots of room for young imaginations.

The whole thing was pink, so we lined the shelves with wood-grain contact paper to give the house wood floors before assembling the shelf per the package instructions.

We bought a variety pack of scrapbook paper at the craft store and covered the back panels with the “wall paper” using clear contact paper to adhere it and give them a protective coating.

I found a few unfinished wood jewelry/notions boxes at JoAnn’s fabrics that made excellent furniture with a little acrylic paint.

For area rugs we cut circles and rectangles out of a bathroom rug from the Fred Meyer home section (also purchased with aforementioned coupon).

We painted balsa wood strips mint green and glued them to the corners to create molding to give the rooms a finished look.

Santa somehow knew the girls were getting a Barbie dream house and brought the girls furniture sets like this bathroom set complete with a flat-screen TV mounted to the towel rack. Barbie is apparently one classy gal.

For a roof, we used a flag case from Michael’s craft store.

They seemed to like it.