Min Pet Shop KIt Outside Portion Finished

It took forever to do the outside portion but I'm finally done.

Mini Pet Shop DIY Kit outside

I'm pretty pleased with the way it turned out; it is very cute and sweet.  The hardest part was putting the darn hinges on.  I put them on twice, in the wrong place the first time, and backward the second, and finally had to get my Dad to fix it.  He did, and the front swings open great now.

The front portion consisted of assembling the door pieces and gluing them together, the window pieces, the decorative paws, The awning, hanging sign, including the thing it hangs from, the door knob, the sidewalk, and the cute little welcome sign.  The only difficult part was getting the glue to stick.  I ended up having to use a glue gun to glue the wire hanger for the sign together, then onto the house, and also for the beads that make up the doorknob and to attach the sidewalk strip to the main front piece.  I used the glue that came with the kit for everything else.

 I bought the little pink clips in the above photo at the dollar store and they came in handy, but I need to find some longer ones.  They worked to hold the tall orange sign and the bone sign in place while they dried.  They really helped for the bone, because that was a bit warped and didn't want to lay flat.

In the above photo, you can see how the entire front swings open.

 I decided to start on Step 3, which is the assembly of the contents of package B.  The first two instructions said to make the shelves, which I did.  The glue that came with the kit did not work for these shelves; they kept falling apart. In the end, I used Alene's Quick Grab Tacky glue, and it worked much better.  I didn't line up all of the long pieces on the orange shelf properly because every time I touched it they shifted out of place and after redoing it 5 or more times, I gave up and decided they didn't have to be perfect. 

The kit is very cute but it is very tedious and there is no sense of creativity like there was when I made my bake shop.  I liked the freedom of making whatever I wanted with the bake shop.   This is more like putting a puzzle together, and it's all cutting, placing, and gluing.  I still enjoy it, but I don't get that creative buzz that I like with this.