I am not sure if you are a fan yourself, but we quite enjoy reading about a little cat character named Chi. The books come in the form of comic books or chapter books and are written and illustrated by Konami Kanata.

The books have been a wonderful distraction during this peculiar time of physical distancing and so it was with pleasure that I accepted my daughter’s offer of working on a small project with her. As it turns out, the birth of this project came from a card (that came with one of the books) of a paper version of Chi, a basket for him to sleep in, two food bowls and a milk carton. Once we put those items together we were hooked and the Chi Dollhouse Project was born.

This project requires a recycled cardboard box (the smaller the cuter), white paper, scissors (a boxcutter would also come in handy), glue, markers and coloured pencils.

I’m including the process in the form of photos below:

The first part consisted of tracing all of the sides of our box onto thick paper. You’ll have to take care to label the sides “up” or “top”  and “inside” or “outside” so as to know the correct way to glue it on the box once you’re done decorating it.

Now it’s time to make a staircase!

Fold your paper.

Cut out the width of your stairs.

Fold it back in place.

Use your box to measure out your roof. Keep in mind that you’ll need to make it longer so that you have room to glue it onto the top of your box. We also thought about adding wood panelling on the inside of our roof to make the attic look pretty :)

Fold the roof in half.

Space for adding glue.

Our roof tiles.

Tiles on the outside.

Wood panels on the inside.

This next part is fun because you get to see the house coming together. This is where you’ll notice why having an “extra long” roof works out well. It allows for you to safely glue the extra bit under the floorboards.

Notice the “blank” part for the glue.

Adding glue under the floorboards.

We used the paper cat bed that came with our book to make another bed. Then we took some old material and folded it to make curtains and bedding to fit our matchbox bed.

A copy of Chi’s bed.

Material for our curtains and bedding.

Making our curtains.

A bed for a child and a cat.

A matchbox is perfect!

Now we had to figure out where to put the stairs and the entryway to our attic. I used the boxcutter to make the small opening and was careful to ask my daughter to step away during that process. I find boxcutters to be so useful and yet they scare the living daylights out of me!

You’ll notice that we glued the stairs in before noticing that they were white and not wood coloured. My daughter quickly fixed that.

After adding a ceiling lamp, we were all done! We think that it’s pretty cute, if we do say so ourselves! :)