Back in Bavorov

It may be a long time since my last post, but when we unlocked the museum door on Monday, it seemed hardly any time at all since I locked it and left it in November.

We is me and butterfly, whom many of you know, and we have arrived in the Czech Republic two months before I normally come to prepare the dolls house museum for its official opening in May.

And I am delighted to announce that at long last the museum actually has a name - Small Worlds.    My thanks to everyone who struggled along with me to find a name that would work in both languages.   This one works better in English than Czech but I am content with it.   Having a name has meant that publicity material can now be prepared.   I am immensely grateful to my daughter-in-law, Laura of Laurart, who is designing the artwork (if you hurry along to this post on her blog you could be in with a chance of a delicious prize, just for leaving a comment).

And my thanks go as well to Abbeybufo of Stitchwords who in an idle moment peeling potatoes (hmm, is that really an idle moment?) not only came up with the name but also the blurb for the flyer.  

At the moment, as you can see from the photos, all is chaos in Small Worlds.   The first thing we did on Monday was to make drawer dividers from cardboard boxes so that we can sort everything into findable places.   I swear that such boxes are made far stronger than most modern furniture.   

Butterfly has a non-working finger at the moment, just what she needs with much dolls house crafting ahead, and it made cutting the slits in the strips very painful.   But by the end of the morning all 13 drawers were equipped with dividers and the terrible job of unpacking and sorting the multitude of shoe boxes could start.  Bear in mind that I have not seen the contents of some of the boxes for more than 12 years........

When we left yesterday afternoon for a well-earned rest, the room looked like this.   Some good friends were coming in the evening to pay us a welcome visit and we coaxed them to Small Worlds first so that we could have their help in moving on to the next stage -getting the shelves up along the wall at one end of the room.  

Like everything we are doing in there at the moment, something else had to be shifted first - in this case many dolls houses.

The trusty Ikea shelves, undaunted by their move from being bookshelves in the UK, are much easier to put up with three or four people and apart from some gentle hammering where too much paint had been applied, they went up quite smoothly.

It wasn't until today, when butterfly was shifting houses onto them, that we discovered nearly all the houses needed the shelves to be just a little further apart.   

But in fact it doesn't matter since this is all work in progress and there is much more shifting around to come in the next days and weeks.    We have now come home for another well-earned rest (four minutes walk from Small Worlds to my house) and the room now looks like this -

Butterfly reckons we have made good progress......actually I think she is right but the next few days are fairly daunting as we continue to unpack and sort.   Once that is done we can get on with the fun stuff of renovating the houses!    

Tomorrow evening, the carpenter (who, along with his delightful daughter, featured in this post) is returning to put up the final set of shelves in the space we cleared today.    We could do it ourselves but would probably end up not on speaking terms so it seems worth the small amount of money it will cost!

I'd like to welcome those who have come to visit my blog from Words and Pictures - I hope you will continue to follow the ups and downs towards a dolls house museum in the Czech Republic and will enjoy the journey.   And welcome back to all my faithful followers - I am sorry that posts have been few and far between in the past weeks but I can promise that there will be many more posts  as things begin to fall into place here.........