So, picture this:

It’s March 2020 and the Prime Minister has just announced a national lockdown to try to stop the spread of Covid 19.

As a teacher, this meant I was working from home which was such a challenge. As a Drama teacher, it was especially hard – how on earth do you teach such a practical subject online?

I planned – I couldn’t use my plans – I re-planned, I taught live lessons, I starred in my own PowerPoint, I videoed myself doing many weird and wonderful theatrical things, I set work, I marked the work I received, I’d stand in the middle of the living room and stare into space every now and then. Each working week was a nightmare. I felt, if possible, more exhausted than normal – people were talking about ‘Zoom Fatigue’ as though this was an actual condition we would all be living with for the rest of the summer.

But, on a positive note, it gave me a break from the classroom and if I hadn’t had that, I might have packed in teaching altogether by now. It also encouraged me to stay in more frequent contact with my friends from Uni – how lovely to spend an evening drinking wine together every week, despite it being over a computer screen.

There was also time. Time to myself, time to slow down, time to enjoy the little things that we too often put to one side in our busy lives. I’d wake up and make a proper pot of coffee using real coffee grounds – something I never usually have time to do. It was a Christmas coffee but who cares? It was delicious. And I had time to spread the yummy amongst my garden, giving the roses a coffee-ground treat for their roots.

And this was when I decided the time was ripe to build an entire dollhouse from scratch. I had already made Mim the Mouse with a crochet hook during the Summer of 2019. I felt she needed a place to live.

It started quite small at first. The first thing I made was a little bucket and some pots and pans. Then my ideas started getting bigger – I progressed to a little kitchen cabinet and then proceeded to build a shed for a felted chicken that I also made.

When I started to hoard all of the cardboard boxes from our pointless, boredom-reducing purchases from Amazon, my poor boyfriend paused in his procrastinatory walk downstairs.

“I’m building a mouse house” I said with determination as I struggled with my metre-long ruler on my make-shift blue prints amid several cardboard structures. Karl nodded. “Good,” he said softly and went back upstairs to be musical. If he gets annoyed with seeing my craft stuff everywhere, he hides it very well!

So it turns out that building an entire doll house and every single miniature object will take a really long time. After two years of hard work, it is finally finished and I am so proud of it – what an achievement!

Upon reflection, here are 30 things that I have learnt from building Mim the Mouse’s house:

1. You will receive a mixture of compliments on your artistic talents and worried looks where your sanity will be questioned.
   
2. When you press your glue gun too forcefully, hot glue will spill out and jam the gun until you can hook it out with tweezers.
   
3. This will bend your tweezers.
   
4. You will have to use your jewellery pliers to unbend your tweezers.
   
5. This will keep happening.
   
6. Burns from glue guns are so, so sore. They go all blistery. But you never learn. And will burn yourself again and again…
   
7. Making weathered stone out of egg boxes is harder than it looks.
   
8. The first ‘flower’ you make out of clay will look like a strange alien vegetable.
   
9. You will get better at making things out of clay.
   
10. Hole punches don’t punch through clay and will jam up your hole punch.
    
11. You will frequently walk around with an unnoticed smear of paint up your leg (often in a very unfortunate colour).
    
12. Sometimes, if a mistake is made, the whole project will have to go in a ‘time-out corner’ until you are no longer angry with it.
    
13. You realise you should buy shares in places like Hobby Craft and The Range.
    
14. Sorting out how you will wire the electrics is a headache and will result in miniature cavity walls.
    
15. Your efforts in creating cavity walls will be in vain when an electrical short gives you a pretty bad shock and nearly sets your house on fire.
    
16. You will be too scared to use the lights again and will spend an absolute fortune on battery operated lights instead.
    
17. You will use trigonometry for the first time since school to work out the dimensions of the roof.
    
18. You will hoard so much that you will drive your partner insane.
    
19. You will tell yourself not to buy any more supplies for a while. And then you will laugh and laugh before buying more supplies.
    
20. You will ache all over from working in the most uncomfortable floor positions.
    
21. Grout will stick to cardboard, it just needs some persuasion. And the fumes will make you dizzy.
    
22. Polyfilla will be your new best friend for all those times you said ‘that’ll do’, instead of using a ruler.
    
23. At Christmas, you will say ‘I know what this needs!’ and then you will hate yourself because you will spend the whole season clearing up fake snow.
    
24. At Christmas, you will also make tiny Christmas cards and write in every single one to show that Mim is not the only mouse.
    
25. This will then lead you to create a rather extensive mouse family-tree.
    
26. Every mouse needs a pet chicken.
    
27. You will believe your mice are real and living very real little lives.
    
28. Even when there is no more room left for furniture and accessories, still you will continue to make more things.
    
29. You start planning and designing a new house for Great Aunty Mildred Mouse because in your head there is a whole story where she originally had Mim’s house but got so old she had to down-size.
    
30. You start planning a whole Mouse-sized village (I’m sorry, Karl).