Dollhouse Miniature Moving Boxes

 

Watch the video here.

 

Since I can't start on the wiring of the dollhouse until all of the items I ordered are here I thought it would be fun to make some moving boxes. I have to admit that I have been kind of obsessed by making these boxes for the last few weeks. I got the idea because I want to stage some scenes to photograph as we get the house more finished.

I started this project by looking online and taking note of the sizes of moving boxes in real life. Since I moved last year I am fairly well versed in moving boxes. Since I got mine at the U-Haul store when I picked up my moving truck that was where I went to get the sizes for the project. I decided to go with 4 sizes – small, medium, large and extra large. I will go into more details on these sizes a little later in this blog post.

I made these out of Kraft color card-stock which is really easy to find at most stores that have card making or scrap-booking papers. Be sure to get card-stock weight not just paper though.

First I wanted to talk about how I went about drawing up the patterns that I am sharing with you so that you can make any size box you want to.

So the first step is to determine how big of a box you want to make. I will use the extra large size that I made on the video as our example here. So I wanted my finished box to be 2” by 1 ½” by 2” tall this was to represent the real box that measured- 24” by 18” by 24” tall.

Now that I know the size of the box I take the smallest of the 2 first numbers- 2” by 1 ½” so the 1 ½ and I divide that in half (¾”) this is how wide I want to cut the flaps for my box. So I start by drawing a line ¾” down from the top of the page to allow for the top flaps on my box.

Next we allow for the height of our box, in this case 2” so that is how far away we draw our next line. Now we add a line for the bottom flaps (¾”) . This line is also the cutting line for the first box, after this we just repeat the same lines the same distances apart. On a standard piece of paper you will get 3 boxes with a tiny bit of paper left over at the bottom.

Now we are going to add the lines that will allow us to fold the sides of the box. Since our box is going to be 2” by 1 ½” our first line is 2” from the edge of the paper. The next line is 1 ½” away from it and then we repeat this for the other two sides of the box. Just be sure that you have them in the same order each time. At the end of this I add another line ¼” away for the gluing flap. If I don't actually draw the line I have in the past forgotten to add it when I cut the paper out.

After we draw out the line we need to score on the lines that will be fold lines. I just used a table knife on top of a piece of cardboard. This works just fine. You can just go ahead and score all the lines or just do the fold lines.

Now cut out the boxes and fold on the scored lines. Glue the tab area to inside of the other end of the piece and clamp.

When gluing the bottom of the box I find it works best to add some kind of weight to keep the bottom flat.

Now you have a set of moving boxes for your dollhouse and just as importantly I hope you can now draft the pattern to draw any size box you need.

Lets look at all four sizes of boxes I showed in the video and talk about the lines and the sizes. On these I color coded the lines in hope you will be able to visualize what each line is a bit better. The black lines are score/fold lines, the blue ones are lines we scored but also need to cut before assembling the box. And finally the red lines are cut lines. I hope this makes sense to you all.

So the small box will finish out at 1 ¼” by 1” by 1” tall. The flaps are ½”.

The medium box will finish out at 1 ½” by 1 ½” by 1 ½” tall. The flaps on this one are ¾'.

The large box will finish out at 1 ½” by 1 ½” by 2” tall. The flaps on this one are ¾'.

The extra large box will finish at 2” by 1 ½” by 2” tall. The flaps are ¾”.

I really hope these directions make sense, I know it seems confusing but I am really hoping between the video, the directions here and the diagrams I drew you understand and go on to make lots of boxes for the dollhouse.

As always I do want to sincerely thank all of you for watching my videos and reading my blog posts. It means so much to me that you are supporting me in this way. If I could ask you all to do just a bit more by subscribing to the channel and liking the videos and leaving comments. Those help more than you can imagine. Also if you could pass the links on to your friends I would appreciate it so much.