Dollhouse donated for auction

The Buffalo Creek Foundation donated a doll house that went up for auction at the Christmas Tree Festival and will now be on permanent display at the Wyoming Pioneer Home for the public to enjoy.

The foundation's representative Sue Blakey and her mother Bea Seaver were the third owners of the doll house when they purchased it in 2000. Originally built in 1979, the first owner is not known.

The doll house is from the Connecticut area and is in the colonial revival or Georgian style, but needed to be updated. When Blakey acquired the dollhouse, it had a 1980s style, and it contained multiple tiny teddy bears in the rooms. The dollhouse is five feet long, three feet tall and two feet wide and has a couple of porches. Blakey removed all the wall paper and stripped it down to the wood. She tried to touch up the paint but was not able to get a perfect match, especially in different lighting conditions. Therefore, she repainted it entirely. Blakey said she put almost 400 hours of work into it.

Also, there were 10 to 11 different volunteers who assisted Blakey in the remodeling of the dollhouse including local businesses who supplied some needed items. 

The purpose of the auction of the dollhouse was to help the community. Jacque Michel of Michel & Moline Accounting was the winning bidder of the dollhouse, with an amount of over $5,200. 

Blakey also told a story where she discovered the dollhouse's name and said, "When we started, I couldn't find any information about it... I knew that it had been owned once before. It came with a box of other stuff that wasn't in the house originally. It had 25 teddy bears and little bitty buttons. But when I got to the very bottom of the box, there was this really crummy-looking little label, like Season's Greetings, like a sticker. I thought I'm not sure why I still got this. And I picked it up and over the back of it was an envelope, a little bitty, tiny envelope. It was two by three inches and I opened it up and it was a Christmas card in it." 

Blakey found it had been handwritten, and it said, "I miss the doll, I miss the bears. Please tell them hello and give and make sure that Santa has hot chocolate for Christmas when he comes and cookies." 

Blakey said, "That told me that somebody had really loved it when he built it. It was addressed 'The Blue House' on Memory Lane in Cromwell, Connecticut... That's the name is the Blue House. So we've got it labeled the Blue House. Because I ended up painting it blue, too."