I added a popsicle stick floor to my dollhouse attic, and I wanted to age it a little to make it look older than it was. It would fit into an attic better that way, and I decided to try aging it the easy way using black paint. This is how I did it, and you can adapt this tutorial for a DIY dollhouse project for yourself and your doll’s house.
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Materials you’ll need:
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Prep the floor.
Dust off the floor that you’re going to paint so that it’s clean and free of dirt. You don’t need to get it totally clean, this is an aging process, so if there are uneven places that’s better than having everything perfectly the same. Make sure that you have loose dust or pieces of paper or anything else brushed off so that the paint will go on evenly.
Read this article about installing a removable popsicle stick floor here.
What kind of paint to use to paint the floor.
I used basic black craft paint, nothing fancier is needed! As long as what you’re using is water-based it will work, so if you have basic watercolors that will work too, but a paint that you have to rub in will be better because it will give you control over how much paint is going on.
If you don’t want such a dramatic look, you can use a dark brown or light grey to give the floor a lighter look.
Add some black paint to a small dish of water. Start with a little paint and get darker if you need to, because too much paint will give you a lot of color that you won’t be able to remove. If you start light you can work your way to darker, but getting too dark too quickly won’t let you control the color as well.
To see how to make a DIY dollhouse fireplace mantle, click here.
Painting the floor.
You can paint the floor with a brush or with a paper towel. The brush will probably put more color on it, so be careful. Remember to start light and get darker as you go!
I started with a paintbrush, but that gives you a blob of darker color, and you have to really rub it off before it sets up and dries. For areas that you want to be darker that’s fine, but it can get too dark too fast, so be careful.
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I rubbed the dark ares to spread it out and lighten it, then I switched to a paper towel and brush in combination.
I took a paper towel and dipped it into the diluted paint, then rubbed it on the floor lightly to darken the boards a little bit.
Really squeeze the paper towel to get the water out, you want it to be pretty dry so that the floor doesn’t get too wet.
By working fast, I could remove some of the paint using the clean part of the paper towel, but it did soak the black paint water up pretty quickly, so if you do this, you need to work fast.
I thought that I would have to do multiple coats of different colors, but rubbing it with the black paint darkened the wood enough that I think that it looks fine for what I need.
If you don’t want to go as dark as black as your first step, you could always use a dark brown or a gray color, then get darker as you go.
What I was going for was the look of old boards that have been in the attic getting dusty for quite some time.
This was a really, really simple way to achieve that look, and even though I might go back and make some areas darker, I think I could get away with leaving it like this with only one coat of the rubbed-on paint.
This literally took me about 10 minutes to do. The good thing about doing it after I had done the popsicle stick floor was that I could see what it was going to look like when it was completely assembled.
It definitely doesn’t have to be perfectly even, but if you can see where some of the floor looks too light you can make it darker pretty easily if it’s all assembled already.
I thought about painting the boards or staining them before I put the floor together, but if I did that I don’t think I would have been able to get the floor to look the way that I wanted to, which was dirty, not just painted.
I probably will go back in and make some areas darker to make it look like something was spilled on the floor, or that there’s water damage from a leaky roof.
Finished popsicle stick floor inside the dollhouse.
After I finished painting the floor, I put the floor back inside the dollhouse attic to see if it fit fine and if it was doing anything else with the warping.
The strange thing about this is that it seems to have shrunk toward the middle of the house, which could explain some of the warping.
I think that if I did this method again I wouldn’t use watercolor paper for backing the sticks on the floor, because it does seem to absorb the water and it changed the size of the paper when it dried.
I ended up with two sections on either side of the attic floor that were larger than I remember them being when I first fit the piece of paper in to make the template for the floor.
I seem to remember leaving some space to give me a little wiggle room to fit the floor in, but not as much as I have now.
As it is, there’s a fairly large gap on either end of the room where there’s no popsicle stick flooring at all.
It’s not a big deal because I can cover it up with something, but it’s just strange that the paper would have shrunk that much.
In any case, I like the way that this floor turned out, it wasn’t too hard to do, and I can take it out if I want to change the look of the house at some point.
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