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Keep Stairs or Not?


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My hubby bought me a Beachside Bungalow kit for Christmas, and I've been thinking about how I want the house to look.  I have not seen a model built, but I am concerned about the size, and if I will have room for everything I want to add.  I have seen some houses that the stairs have been left out, which would free up some room, but I'm not sure how much I like a "stair free" dollhouse.

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Even in larger houses, the rooms don't seem to hold as much as we like to put into them, and they make it hard to arrange the rooms the way we would like to. It seems like about half of us want our stairs, and the other half don't, so it's personal taste. For me, I sure wish I hadn't put stairs into my Apple Blossom.

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Even though it is a large house, they really messed up the symmetry of my rooms, and took a lot of space. I originally put stairs into my granddaughter's San Fran, and after seeing how much more room I had in mine without stairs, she wanted me to take hers out.

I love stairs, but unless I get a house with an entry hall, I don't think I'll ever put them in again. I also left them out of the Primroses, the Orchid and the Linfield. I can't imagine how much space they would take in a tiny house.

It's all up to you, if you won't miss them, then leave them out!

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Mine is the RGT Apple Blossom. If I remember right, RGT has the rights to the Walmer houses, which explains why they are so similar!

 

edit: Your house show why I wish I had left out the stairs. You can arrange yours so much better, and your rooms on the left hand side are larger. I always wished I had left mine out and moved the wall a tad to make those rooms bigger.

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This could be a little work, but one way to put stairs in (on the first floors, anyway), would be to adjust the front door and and have split stairs, like a split level house.

This works best on a house that looks more like a city house. You take your front door and move it to one side and 1/2 level up. Mark off the amount of floor space you need on your second floor for double the width of your staircase. Then cut that section out of the floor, leaving a part about 2" to 3" wide across the back where the little people can walk off the staircase..

Then you split your staircase and add a landing so it makes a U turn. like this: stairs.jpg.f928fef083ccbbb34b68a0e633d7a

 

If you had your stairs on the inside of the house, this is what they would look like. Here, the door to the outside would be on the landing.

Now you have half stairs going down to the kitchen and dining area and half stairs going up to the living room (or you could switch it around and have your living area on the first floor and the kitchen and dining on the second floor). Even though your kitchen, dining, and living areas are on separate floors, they don't seem like it. A , lot of modern houses have a split level entry, so this looks realistic .

If you use the stairs in a house like the RGT/Walmer houses, the width you'd lose from the stairs would be about 5". But that would leave you at least 12" x 18" for the rest of your room. You aren't breaking your room up with walls, either, so they seem more spacious.

Just another way you can fit in stairs without having them look like they're taking up half the house.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I am in the process of building my first dollhouse.  It is the 1:24 scale RGT bungalow.  I left the stairs out so that I could have more decorating space.   I got a small piece of wood along with some wood filler to fill in the hole.  You can't even tell there was a hole there.  I think it looks perfectly fine.

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  • 3 weeks later...

A staircase  takes about 20 square inches of valuable floor space.

I almost always put stairs into a house that will belong to a child because kids love stairs and a front door that opens. But I wallpaper and trim behind and under them so they can be removed if the child redecorates as she grows up. 

In a collector/display home  a nice staircase could be grand if it can be furnished and paper and accessorized for example a circular staircase and a baby grand piano ...a mural might be a bit over the top...we'll see.

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  • 5 years later...

When I was a kid I had one house with stairs and one without. The one without always stuck in my craw. I thought of it as the not as good house. That said, I guess it depends on you. Who will use the house and what do they value? No wrong answers here- both options have merit!

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Especially in US-made dollhouse, which are open in the back, the absence of several components -- stairs, bathrooms, kitchens, and servants' quarters for example -- can be explained as being in the unseen part of the house. If it is a period house, the missing rooms may rightly have been located in a building not attached to the main house.

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