Cathy's Flower House miniature craft kit from Rolife review

A few months ago I wrote about the latest craft project that my husband and I had embarked on - Cathy's Flower House miniature kit from Rolife. We worked really hard on it, and completed it just before Christmas. I thought I'd write a little review of the kit, just in case you've seen them out and about and wondered what it was like to put one together!

We bought our kit on Amazon and it's worth keeping an eye on prices as they do go up and down. Expect to pay around £40 - £45. Our kit is called Cathy's Flower House (affiliate link) and there are plenty of other kits to choose from. If you want to see an assembled miniature house in person then it might be worth a trip to your local garden centre, ours is a Haskins and currently has several on display including this one.

Everything inside the box is sorted into numbered bags, although there wasn't always much logic as to what went where. Our kit included glue and paint but not batteries, I think that the inclusion of batteries (and in some cases the glue and paint) depends on where you buy the kit from. The kit contents are a mixture of small coloured wooden pieces, sheets of paper and tissue paper with both pre-cut and printed parts, the electrical components for making the light and lots of tiny little bits and pieces that fit together in various ways.

There are some large paper templates which you can use to match up the pieces and make sure that you have the correct part for each section. We did have quite a few bits left over at the end which confused us a bit, but I think they were just spares! The instruction booklet is large and detailed with lots of pictures.

We started the kit by painting the large wooden pieces which form the sides and base of the flower house. Then we worked through the instruction book in order to build everything that goes inside. Some of the items were straightforward to put together and others were more fiddly and complicated. Luckily we found that the supplied glue was very good and dried quickly.

My favourite part of the whole kit is the blue drawer and cupboard piece. The gold coloured wire has to be bent into shape to form the handles. When complete it is filled with flowers and has plants trailing out of it. It's a shame that after all that effort it's tucked away in the back corner!

Some of the plants, like the ones in the photograph below, are made using printed leaves which pop out from a backing sheet and are glued into place on lengths of green wire. It's a bit fiddly, but they look really good when put together. You can see a pound coin in the photo which gives an idea of the scale.

We didn't realise when choosing the set that the plants would be so difficult to make, and this kit has a lot of plants! There are lots of tiny pieces of paper, little bits that need to be rolled up, glued and stuck together, and sometimes the instructions were a bit vague with a few translation errors. But on the whole the instructions were very good and it wasn't too difficult to work out what we needed to do.

Once all the plants and other accessories have been built then you can position them on the shelves and glue them down, and there are clear diagrams showing where each part goes. Then the shelves are glued to the base piece.

This is the chance to have a good look at what you've built, because once it's inside the greenhouse part it isn't as easy to see! You need to make sure that everything is glued down firmly because once the roof is on you can't get back inside to make any adjustments.

I love the way that the flowers and plants have turned out. Some of them are so simple, just some green fluff glued inside a large bead, but they look so effective and realistic.

Next it was time to build the plastic outer greenhouse part. This was quite easy to put together. The black frames are already in place, although you glue more black strips on at the end to hide the joins in the plastic and the wiring.

The most difficult part of the build was fitting these plastic walls onto the base. I suspect we may have made a mistake somewhere along the line, because our tabs didn't line up correctly with the slots in the base. We had to use a small saw to make the holes larger so that we could fit the top part on properly. It worked out in the end but it was a bit awkward at times.

And here's the finished flower house!

We love it and we are so proud of it. It's so detailed and it looks really good from the outside.

The greenhouse is fitted with a small battery powered light which you need to wire up from scratch, although it's only a simple circuit. Wire cutters and strippers were really helpful here as the wire is very thin and fiddly to work with. You also need to use plastic tubes which are heat shrunk to the wires. This wasn't something that we had done before so we were a bit nervous, but we watched a few YouTube videos and managed to do it quite easily using a lighter. 

The light inside looks really good, I love how it shines out of the plastic panels. It certainly adds some interest to our bookshelves.

Before starting the kit I read in an online review that it would take about twenty hours to put together. It's difficult to estimate how long we spent but I'm guessing that it took us at least that long - and that's with two of us working on it at the same time! But once you've got the hang of it I think that subsequent kits would be quicker, and all those plants did take a long time. 

We had a lot of fun putting this kit together, when we got started it could quite easily absorb us both for several hours, even my husband who has a very short attention span. It was lovely to have a project that we could work on together. We are already eyeing up the next one, they do a lovely Book Nook range which would look great on my bookcase!