SCK Tries…Rolife DIY Miniature House Kit

It’s another edition of SCK Tries where we try out a DIY to see how it works in real life and whether we’d recommend you give it a go. This time it’s a miniature house kit by Rolife.

The Original DIY

After my experience making (and fully customising!) a miniature dollhouse kit back in 2021, I finally felt up to trying another one. I spotted the Rolife DIY Miniature House kits at Oshoppu and this Mini Kids Room was too cute not to buy as a birthday treat for myself. It looked a lot smaller than my previous kit so I was hopeful it would be much easier to make.

Kit Contents & Materials

The kit includes almost everything you need, including a full colour instruction booklet (in Japanese), glue, sandpaper and tweezers. The kit contents are mostly pre-cut pieces of wood/plastic and printed paper/card, plus all kinds of random bits like beads, fabric and wire. You also need a pair of scissors, craft knife, ruler and pencil – and I also found jewellery pliers were extremely useful, especially for bending the wire pieces. Thankfully there was no painting required this time.

Even though the instructions are in Japanese, the booklet includes lots of diagrams that are easy to follow and every piece is labelled. There’s even pages with full size outlines of the wood/plastic pieces so you can place them on top and make sure it’s the right size and shape. If you’re used to building IKEA furniture, the process is quite similar. The camera option in the Google Translate app was also a huge help when I wasn’t quite sure what to do next.

Process

I was a little disheartened to see that this was actually very similar to the previous kit but thankfully with some major improvements. A lot of the little objects above are wooden shapes that you stick a printed design onto with glue, which make them much more solid. A lot of them are also printed on card and you can pop out the pieces rather than using scissors. There are still quite a few fiddly little paper boxes to fold though.

The major issue is that they included the worst possible type of glue – a liquid PVA that soaks into the paper and fabric and takes ages to dry. Trying to stick 2, 3 or even 4 pieces of wood together with wet glue is pretty much impossible unless you have 3 hands to hold them together for half an hour. You can see how wonky my shelf unit turned out as even though I built it in stages, gravity would shift pieces while it was drying. I did end up using my trusty Gütermann glue for some pieces.

Even with those complaints, I did enjoy making this kit and everything was cute enough that I didn’t need to do any customisation. Many of the the items have multiple stages so I could do a bit of each one day and then leave it to dry until next time. It definitely felt good every time I could pop a finished item back in the box for the full assembly.

The End Result

It turned out just like the box photo and looks really cute! Assembling is easy enough as there are photos in the booklet with every piece marked. It is a little tricky to get all the little items sitting nicely and you can’t move it without everything falling over. I would glue a lot of things down if I was putting it on display or using it for photos.

Unlike last time, I made all of the items, though I was quite tempted to skip the cardboard box that is almost completely hidden! I’m glad I tried this but I’m not sure I’ll be putting it on display. I’ll probably end up taking some of the little objects and rearranging my bigger room to use them. I’ll take some more photos if I do!

This particular kit is now sold out at Oshoppu (UK) but they still have other designs in the series – a living room, bakery and garden. Use the code SCK15 to get 15% off! You can find all the kits including the kids room from other Rolife/Robotime stockists worldwide including their official store.

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This is not a sponsored post and I bought the kit with my own money but Oshoppu currently advertise on SCK and I used their discount code.