How To Make a Refrigerator

Virginia Woolf first spoke about a room of one’s own 1928, but I can’t believe she was the first person to do so. It’s a basic human instinct. It’s our impulse to not only seek shelter from a rough world for a few hours, but to build shelter for a lifetime.

We move around, so the rooms change. But we carry the need for a room of our own all our life long. I must have felt this was something I had in common with one of Sam’s granddaughters a few years ago, because it was the most natural thing to begin to build her a dollhouse.

I started with the kitchen.

Here is the finished kitchen, ready for delivery. The house was beginning.

I planned the house so that each room as it was finished could be delivered to her as a three-sided room with a floor. Everything would be made from materials I had around the studio, scrap foam-core board, decorated and colored papers, pens, paint, beads, thread, and glue.

My faithful Photoshop 6 computer program would help me shrink the sizes of photos of real things like a cooking pot and a box of Cheerios, before printing them out. Then they could be glued on small pieces of foam core board.

I used a standard dollhouse scale of 1/12, so that my 12-inch-square floor would equal a 12-foot-square room. Today, I took my “Dollhouse” manila folder out of the file drawer, and opened it. I see the refrigerator right at the top of my sketch for the kitchen.

The 1/12 scale works for the furniture and objects, as well as for the floor and walls.

I used foam core board for the body and shelves of this refrigerator. (We called it an ice box when I had my own first dollhouse, because it was cooled by a chunk of ice, late 1940’s). The doors are white mat board as planned, but the handles turned out to be red beads. Hot-glued snips of Velcro hold the doors closed.

It probably has hinges made of glued fabric strips, certainly not paper that would tear in no time. I’d have to ask to borrow it back to check on this.

My curiosity guided the next steps. What would be inside? Tiny bottles and jars would fit on the two shelves. Since the insides of the doors were flat, I decided to use photos of our own refrigerator.

I challenge you take to a candid photo of your refrigerator, right now, as it is. (Not really, I wouldn’t do that.)

The photos I took that day. Not too bad : )

This little dollhouse kitchen came together nicely, with a blue and white checked floor, a microwave, cookbooks on the shelf, and a nice day out the window. The table is set for a little breakfast. Everything you need is in (or on top of) the refrigerator.

So this is how you make a refrigerator.

Virginia Woolf probably wasn’t thinking of a kitchen. But for a child you know, or for anyone young at heart, this might be just the thing to make for them, a room of their own.

My paperback copy of A Room Of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf has copyright dates 1929 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc, and 1957 by Leonard Woolf.