Thanks! I've been working on it since early summer...I got everything from Home Depot, except for the hinges, which I got at Michaels. Any craft store (or maybe a hobby shop, come to think of it) should have the hinges.
Claws, I think as long as you'd have a place to store it, you could probably build one. I put it in my downstairs closet. No one uses the guest room long enough to need to hang their clothes, and it's not sturdy enough to go in my room and masquerade as something else (I wish it was, but that's because of how it's built).
It actually wasn't very difficult to build...I had help, because I'm too small to control some of our power tools
, but Home Depot has stations where the employees will cut things for you. The only cuts we made at home were the hole for the stairs and the dividing walls (doors, etc.).
It's completely modular. The floor is one board, and the trim is glued to that, with a backing of wood (a strip 1cm square) about 1/4 inch away from it. That makes a track for the walls to slide through. The first story ceiling and the floor of the second story is the same way, but it has tracks on both sides to allow it to rest on the first floor walls and support the second floor walls. The walls with the doors and the downstairs divider are separate pieces with their own trim, so that I can put them wherever. The stair case is propped up with a stick >.<
It was designed so that if I ever need to move it, the whole thing can come apart and lay more or less flat. That also makes it easier to photograph, since I can pretty much just move a wall if it's in my way.
The only thing I'd recommend is maybe building it out of really sturdy cardboard instead of wood. The thing is a pain to put together by myself >.< And to account for the width (and warping, if you're building it out of wood.) that paint will add. Alex's wall is a pain to put in place, and we had to sand a little of the paint off the bottom to get it to stay where I wanted it. It also warped a bit, because I didn't paint the other side. Always paint both sides.
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