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a Charleston at Good Will


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Our Good Will stores offer a 25% "senior discount" every Tuesday, which is why you'll rarely find me here on Tuesdays. Yesterday I nearly died when the next-to-last store we walked into had a finished (and damaged) Charleston sitting on a table with US$69.99 price tags stuck all over it. Why is it not now sitting somewhere in my cluttered little house awaiting a "magic" touch? Because after what I went through with the Storybook Cottage I doubt I'd have the patience for all the TLC this poor house would need.

It had obviously been dropped, so the trim on the left side window would have to be replaced. Also, while most of it appeared to have been built using our old "friend" hot glue, I wasn't sure about a lot of critical joins. The side windows were the only ones that still had their acetate and there was NO interior trim. At all. The doors had been upgraded and beautifully finished on the outside. Nothing on the inside, including NO interior trim.

I expect it will eventually sell to someone for their child(ren) to finish demolishing, and it breaks my heart! And if I didn't already have so many unbuilt kits howling at me and/ or room to put it in the queue I'd be in full wheedle with DH right now!

Only the front of the roof was shingled, BTW. It looked from some of the work that had been done that someone had set out to build a lovely house but, not knowing or understanding about things like sandpaper and primer, sort of fell down on the job.

Now I really wish that one would be rereleased! It has the look of the Low Country rice plantation houses, rather than the "Rainbow Row" Battery houses in downtown Charleson that the Earth & Tree Charlestonian resembles.

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Holly, I feel the same way. I would rather bash a kit from scratch than to try and revamp a dying dollhouse :ohyeah: . I have seen several beat up houses but I always look away because they are just too much work for me. It seems harder to fix up than it is to bash as you build.

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Well I knew you would understand! I really would love to get my itchy little paws on a kit, though! It just begs for coffered ceilings and stained/ leaded glass windows!

I did like the Flamingo & Swamp mural border paper they used upstairs in what I would have made the room with the bathtub; considering the era of the rice plantations there would have to be a rather elegantly appointed "necessary" at the foot of a formal garden and maybe a "thunderbox" built into the second floor stair's bottom step!lol.

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I did like the Flamingo & Swamp mural border paper they used upstairs
Now THAT would be a sight to see :ohyeah: It sounds interesting. That house is So big too. What would you do with a house that size? Would you keep it?
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I would certainlyh want to! I do have a grandchild of my acquaintance who just happens to live in Charleston, and both us grandmas have actively hinted that since both her parents' biological clocks are loudly ticking and their first effort is such a charmer, they may as well go for broke & try for another!lol

Ahh, too bad florida is so far away
But what a great excuse for a trip down here! (we're talking about 25 miles from the GA state line!)
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fixing up a broken doll house sounds like a blast to me. Why is it so hard?
Other than taking it entirely apart without destroying anything (God knows what else it was glued with or how long ago it was built, because it has been discontinued for A WHILE) and cutting out all the replacement parts for the broken stuff and making all the missing interior trim (and doors, this house cries out for interior doors!) from "scratch" and finding enough acetate the same thickness to make new window inserts plus the time to strip off what can be stripped and sand everything down it's NOT hard, just time-consuming.

What I learned when I rehabbed a StorybookCottage that was not in quite as bad shape is that I get so angry at whoever started to build the kit and left it so incomplete that instead of having a blast I have frequent snits when I have to walk away and go fix myself a stiff drink and curl up with a trashy novel (I don't happen to read trashy novels, so it takes me even longer to calm back down).

Basically I'm at an age where I see no reason to spend my remaining years doing something that upsets me in the name of "salvage" when I have so much more fun creating from new. Y'all young folks who enjoy it do the rehabbing!

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It take at least twice as long to fix a mistake on a completed house that it does to build it properly in the first place. I like to restore/repair any house worth the hours of time and attention it takes but as far as built houses that where built without never seen a piece of sandpaper or are wall papered with contact paper and carpeted with full size house remnants and filled with dust... these I will only take for free if htere is anything at all I can salvage. If there are some good unpainted commercially made components I might go $5.00. Just because the kit cost $XX.XX does not mean that it is worth anything at all poorly built. To me $70.00 is alot of money.

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I posted elsewhere that our local Good Will stores have decided to price themselves away from the thrift store end of the spectrum and more toward the resale shop, but IMO as long as they are going to continue to offer broken & damaged goods they need to price them realistically. I would have brought that puppy home for up to US$10 and cussed every poor little bird in our end of the state to death to make it right, and bored y'all to death with venting my frustrations, because I'm a soft touch for a homeless dh and at the end of it all it would go to Toys for Tots (unless I get REALLY good at making my own moldings, f'rinstance). The house had good "bones", too bad so many of them were broken!

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  • 2 weeks later...

Up here in Maryland the Goodwill stores are doing the same thing...overpricing things. I saw a very nice hope chest made by Lane a couple of months ago. It was scratched and dented, but still in nice shape. However, they wanted $150 for it. Huh? $150? I had to check and make sure I was in Goodwill. I would have paid up to $50 for it, but $150??? No Way!!! Not at Goodwill.

I have yet to find a dollhouse or kit in Goodwill, but I think I would venture to buy one put together poorly IF it was at a reasonable price. My Dremel set and I are very good friends, and knowing what a perfectionist I am, I would probably dismantle and rebuild one...especially a discontinued kit!!

But again, the PRICES!!! Plus, all the stuff is donated, not on consignment, so I don't understand why they are doing this. Plus, another thing they are starting to do is auctions. They get nice items in, and instead of putting them out at a reasonable price, they put them in a glass case with a number on a card in front of them. Then, you have to put in a bid on it. At the end of the week (or whatever the time frame is) the highest bid wins. Really fries me!!! If I want to bid, I'll go on eBay!

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I agree with Jewels, it does sound like fun! Granted I never renovated a house already built so I might have no idea what I'm talking about, but it still sounds like something I would like to try.

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Well, Julie & Maria, that's the way I felt when I found the partly- (badly) built Storybook Cottage I tried to rehab; I wound up doing very elementary cosmetic stuff and gave it to Toys for Tots (if I couldn't disassemble it without tearing it to splinters, I was pretty sure a child would have fun with it!). My "silk purse" STILL looked like a sow's ear when I was done with it, but it was a much prettier sow's ear.

Poor Pitiful Pearl, the $2 wreck, on the other hand, was assembled originally mostly with hot glue and is therefore barely hanging together. I realize ahead of time I will have to make decent trims & doors and I won't go looking through the box that doesn't contain the parts missing, because there isn't any. Yes, the feral cats will be sell provided for, but I turn the air blue with new kits sometimes, too (although not the Magnolia, this is the first kit to make it all the way through the build with almost no *magic* words).

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I tried to sell two of my houses at a garage sale, fifteen dollars and twenty! Every one like them but no one wanted them sad.gif so they are off to goodwill. *snff* Its just that i have too many. Boy oh boy do i miss them... My good will is pricey but not as steep, and no auctions. Difernt company?

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Corwin, I feel your pain! DH is after me to sell some of mine because they take up so much room! I, on the other hand, would like him to find a home for the exercise machine he never uses and to build me a shelving unit along that wall that could house my houses when I'm not playing with them. I cannot see GIVING any of them to Good Will when I know they'll turn around and slap a pricetag on them close to half of what I might be willing to sell them for.

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