Spaceport: Part 1

When R decided she really liked Star Wars, I gave her some of my old Star Wars figures from my childhood. And after time, she was starting to amass a bit of a collection of these and other small toys. And as toy collections grow, so does the mess of a child's room.

R also has a big dollhouse. A nice big wooden, handcrafted (as far as I can tell), dollhouse. It was a hand-me-down gift from a friend whose daughter no longer used it. R did like it and use it for a while. But eventually she stopped playing with it. It was too small for her stuffed toys and too big for her smaller figures. So it became a place for dirty clothes and toys she didn't use. It moved from room to room, taking up precious space in our London flat. So one day I asked her about it.

You don't really use your dollhouse. Do you not really like it?

(sheepishly) No.

How about we turn it into a space port?

YES!

That's where the Spaceport project began. Today it's gone well beyond what I had intended. The original plan was:

1. remove the top two floors of the dollhouse
2. turn the bottom level into a spaceport for her Fisher Price airplane (named Moya)to park inside

I took all the remaining parts of the dollhouse and put them in the bookshelf we used to store toys and stuff. Which had the nice effect of splitting the large shelves in two. Already it added storage and saved space.

I had some ideas of how to decorate the spaceport to make it more exciting, but I was hesitant to start. Partly because it meant making permanent changes to the dollhouse, and partly because much of what I had in my head was, if I was honest, beyond my skills. Turn out, when I did try enhancing it, pretty much everything I tried failed at first. Then I'd have to skill up to make it work. Repeat over and over for a year and you can imagine it's gotten quite elaborate by now. But I am getting ahead of myself…

The Falcon

She liked putting all her star wars toys together on a broken piece of styrofoam and saying it was either spaceship or a sofa. Usually the former. L and I talked about colouring and shaping the styrofoam to look a bit like the Millennium Falcon, but that never really materialised.

Time passed, as it does, and one day I was following links on the web, as you do. I ended up on the Star Wars site, on a page talking about the original Millennium Falcon toy. This bit struck me:

It measured about 53 centimeters long, and compared to a figure of Han Solo (about 10 centimeters tall) was almost four times too small. If Kenner had built the Falcon on a 1:1 scale with the figures, it would have been about 190 centimeters long. Hasbro almost achieved this with their “big” edition of the Falcon in 2008 which measured about 82 centimeters.

“Big” edition??? I'd never heard of that. A quick search on the web found a trove of reviews and pictures. This Millennium Falcon would be just the sort of dollhouse that she'd appreciate. But given that it was released in 2008 and there was no way it'd still be in shops, I dismissed it as just a fantasy. That was until L introduced me to the world of Ebay.

It took a couple of months of looking, but I eventually found one at a reasonable price (they usually go for at least £100 in reasonable condition, so I was lucky). When it showed up, it was, for starters, huge. L took some photos of me playing with it.

Are you sure it's for her and not for you?

Well… did I ever tell you about the time when I was a kid and I asked for a toy Falcon if I could keep my room clean for a year?

Did you manage it?

Are you kidding? I didn't last a week.

R loved the Falcon. It became the home for her Star Wars and other toys and lived on top of the spaceport. Where it lives to this day. But the spaceport itself has changed quite a bit. but that's a story for part 2.