Our House Made of Paper

Although bloggers open their homes and are proud to display many photos of the inside of their houses, one part of the house we don't often see is the outside. Some say it's for security, and I agree, privacy is a good thing, so I've come up with another way to show you what my house actually looks like.

A paper sculpture.

A while a go I saw this idea on a blog called Fresh Nest Design that no longer seems to exist but I wanted to give them credit for this, because it is such a cute idea.

Here is where I live!

I made this with a simple piece of art that I thrifted {the one on the left}, some paint to freshen up the frame and inside and I used card stock paper you can find at any craft store. I painted the inside with light blue paint that I had on hand and the frame white. The one on the right is what I made our kitchen chalkboard calendar from. Each were $2 at a yard sale.

Then I got to work on my house design. Take a photo of your house as straight on as you can, and use that as a guide. You can print it or just reference from a photo, either way works.

Now at first this might seem complicated depending on how many floors you have or the structure of your house. Don't over complicate it, just start with the basics.

Here is the first and second floors and the roof. You can easily see shapes based on your picture.

Once you get that down you can add the windows, with or without curtains, shutters, grass and whatnot. These pieces of paper are loose on the canvas at this point. You want to go for placement and size, making sure your trees are in proportion to the porch.

Again use the photo, what is in front of what? How do the windows fit on the second floor? And so on.

Then you can glue it all down with regular or craft clue and some of those raised glue dots or foam to raise up the paper pieces. This is where the fun comes in to make your stairs look dimensional or the landscaping pop out. You can see I did this with our stairs, bushes, porch roof and columns.

I used scissors with different edges to create the roof layers. These scalloped edge scissors can create shingles! Or perhaps a pond you might have. Anyone have a pond? I also matched the paper color to the paint color of the rooms. Fun!



Here is a close up of the grass, simply cut the paper close together perpendicular, although not all the way through a strip of green paper.

We do have large bushes in front. The neighbor's cat likes to sleep under them :-)

Expirament with different colors of paper. It's neat to see what you can create with paper.

And this is what my house looks like! Grey with white trim and grey shingles. Our steps goes down to the sidewalk and the bay windows on the second floor are my office.

What do you think? Wouldn't these make great gifts for friends who move into a new home or move away to remember their old place? Or it's even a fun kid's craft. Will you make a paper sculpture of your house?

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