Recent Acquisitions: Barbie's Dream Kitchen and Dinette and a Really Strange But True Tale

   UPDATE: Regular readers will know we are taking a trip to England soon, (A treat from Ken's sister.), so he will be off work without pay for two weeks. In view of this, and our shrinking space in the house, we have decided to sell the Dream Kitchen to help with the house payment that will be due not long after we get back from England. You can find it now on Ebay. I'll let you know what happens with it.I'll be sorry to see that tiny Corning Ware go, and I could have used that kitchen step ladder in my Dreamhouse! Oh well...
UPDATE TO THE UPDATE:The Dream Kitchen has sold. That will help alot. Thanks to the bidders!

 To start off, there are quite a few followers that have somehow slipped in without getting the traditional welcome. So, here goes. Welcome to Joyce Swanger,lollylocks,Deanreen,Allenoel,rodrigo_argentino, valerie shakhov, Marcy G, and of course, Miss L Spooky, our giveaway winner.If I've welcomed you before, you just got welcomed again. If I still missed you, send me a comment. I really wish these names showed up in my dashboard in the order you joined so I could keep track better.
  In my post updating you on what I've been doing recently I forgot to mention that I started a Flickr account a while back. So, if you are interested in seeing some of the pictures from the blog without all the yap, check it out HERE.

  Today I'm showing you an item I found at the Hospice Garage Sale a couple of Fridays ago. It's the hard to find Barbie Dream Kitchen and Dinette.

The original catalog listing for the Dream Kitchen and Dinette.

This is the paper that originally came on the Kitchen and Dinette. The picture is borrowed and I'll be happy to remove it if asked. I wanted to give you an idea of what it looked like new and with all the pieces.

It was just sitting in the driveway and I picked it up as I came up the driveway and kept on walking.
According to some of the sources I found,The Dream Kitchen and Dinette was produced in 1964,two years after Barbie's first Dream House,and the same year as Barbie's New Dream House.

Other sources say it was produced from 1965 to 1966. 

The above catalog ad says the 'toys on pages 441 through 673 can be ordered from now until September 1,1966'. I would say that means this is a 1966 catalog.or late 1965 at the latest. Of course, the Kitchen and Dinette could have been in the catalog for more than one year.  But from the look of the Kitchen and Dinette, with it's bright colours and more modern design, I would say the later date is probably more accurate.

The dining room.

 Skipper's Dream Room was also produced about the same time. Gee, these guys sure dreamed alot.
The only part of the actual structure that's missing from my Dream Kitchen is the small piece of wall to the right of the built in oven that has the fridge on it. I guess you can't have everything.In this case, no refrigeration.

There are two stools for the counter and a kitchen step ladder. I think the step ladder is my favourite piece!

All the curtains are there.

And I have all the cloth items except the tablecloth.

"You might want to put this apron on before you start those dishes."

"Thanks. Here Midge. I'll wash and you dry." There are two tea towels and an apron too.

And these three pot holders.

Two place mats and two napkins.

  These were no sew pieces you cut out yourself.
I think I also have all the furniture: kitchen table with two chairs...

  Most of the accessories seem to be here too.

The toaster really pops the toast out. The knives are real metal. I have a fork too, but the tines are broken. The cups and plate are the  same ones that were sold as part of the Barbie Go Together collection.

I also have two casserole dishes with lids...

I love these, but isn't the little one really too small for Barbie?

...and the matching coffee pot you can see way above and coming up.

...the table service for two, in blue.
There's one cooking pot you can see above and below too. I'm not sure how many originally came with the set.The green cups and telephone were also part of the Barbie Go Together line of furniture and accessories.

There's also a phone book and Barbie's cook book.

There's that coffee pot. That pink thing with holes is the open dish washer.

One of those counters where you can sit and eat or talk to the person in the kitchen.

Ok, now here's where it gets weird. Also in this kitchen/dinette were these little homemade boxes.

Some kid spent a lot of time on these. I'm wondering if they had a pattern for these, or if they were totally the kid's creation. But I digress. 'What's so weird?', you're wondering. Well, I was looking at the little boxes and I noticed there was a 'Happy Aniverseary' one.(The kid's spelling, not mine!)

Nice handwriting though. Better than mine!

Whose anniversary? (Sorry, aniverseary...) Oh, here's a box with some names on it.

Oh. Must be Barbie and Don's 'aniverseary'. Barbie and Don?! Where have I heard that before? Ahhh!!! Remember last August when I went to Salvation Army and found a Barbie's New Dreamhouse that they practically made me take home and only charged me 10 cents when I insisted on paying for it?

Well remember what I found in it?

"You are invited to our wedding tomorrow at 6:30 pm. Sincerly, Barbie and Don"

How weird is this??!! And lest you think it might not be the same kid, look at the B's and 'r's in 'Barbie' and 'Barbra' and the D in 'Don' and 'McDorm'.

The outside of the invitation.There were a couple of the old metal Barbie stands and a Skipper/Skooter stand in the Kitchen Dinette too. They must be  Barbra, Mardge and Scooter McDorm's stands!

This is so strange! I got the Dreamhouse because while I was in Salvation Army shopping somebody dropped it off and it was still outside when I came out. I happened to see it as I was putting my stuff in my van.  They were going to throw it away because it was in pieces and needed reassembled. They thought it was trash! I didn't get to the Hospice sale as soon as they opened , although I was pretty early. There were about 4 Hospice sales in that little housing development, and we went to the other three first. The Kitchen and Dinette was sitting there when I walked up and no one cared. What are the odds I would find both of these Barbie structures, belonging to the same kid, at two different places, a year apart?! Why was the Kitchen still sitting around to be donated a year after the Dreamhouse was donated to Salvation Army? Really weird! Now what I really want to know is, where are this kid's dolls?! Barbra! Mardge! Scooter! Don! Wait for me! I'm coming!

The Most Unbelieveable Deal: Barbie's New Dream House

    Ok.A couple of Fridays ago I dropped Ken off at work and headed to check out the thrift stores, which are on that side of town. I went to our local Salvation Army, which is both a donation center and a store. They have had some great vintage dolls this summer, so I'm prepared for almost anything lately, but not what I found that day. I found a couple of dolls, but nothing too amazing. I came out and was putting my bag in the van, when I looked over to the front of the store where the donation door is. I got really excited because I saw what I knew was a vintage cardboard Barbie structure in a box. I just couldn't tell which one it was. I went up to have a look and freaked. It was Barbie's second house, the New Dream House.

Barbie's New Dream House from 1964. The rooms could be configured in different ways.

We had one of these as a kid. Well, I say 'we'. My sister got it for Christmas one year.

My sister and her New Dream House on the left. I'm on the right, and much more concerned with that new washing machine.I've already opened my new dish set, (in the foreground), and obviously my Tiny Thumbelina, because that's her pink box next to the dishes. Into the '70s the dishes were kept in that Thumbelina box.

  I loved it. We didn't get to play with it much though. Our mom was obsessed with a clean house,and she considered The Dream House a mess waiting to happen.It spent most of it's life in a closet, and we weren't very often allowed to "have that thing spread out all over the floor."   She lived in constant fear of "What if somebody was to come" and find our house a mess. Having "that thing spread out all over the floor" constituted a mess. (As did blanket houses, and most other forms of play. This is why we mostly played in our rooms or outside. Other than a tiny table and chair against the wall between the living room and "the good room", no one entering the downstairs of our house would have had any clue that children even lived there.) Did I mention that we lived in the middle of nowhere, the nearest neighbors at least a mile down the road in either direction, and nobody ever came? 
  When we got older my sister gave me the house. She forgot about that when we grew up though, and gave it to her first husbands nieces. So it was long gone and I really wanted to replace it. I finally got one off 'an auction site' ast year, and it only has a couple of problems. (You can see it in my post from last October,More Amazing Barbie Stuff Today.)
  I couldn't tell how bad the house at Salvation Army was because it was all apart and piled in a box.I went in right away to ask the clerk if someone was there who could put a price on it for me. She said nobody would be there who could do that until Monday.Of course, this was Salvation Army, so there was always the danger of them pricing it by taping a big tag to it, (And it's cardboard, so we all know what that means, right boys and girls?), or writing the price on it with their stupid black crayon pencil.I then asked if I could go out and take a look at it to see if it was even worth bothering with. She said sure, so I headed out. I stuck my head in the donation loading doorway to tell them what I was up to.I started to look through the box. It was in pieces and has a bit of wear to it.I started taking the bits out to see if I could tell if it was all there. I noticed the patio door was there, and the paper rug. Pretty soon the guy who takes in the donations came out to get to work. He asked me what the thing in the box even was, because it was in so many pieces he couldn't tell. (And he is young, so he had never seen a cardboard doll house before!) I explained that it was a house. He said, "The worst pieces are in the bottom." He said he thought it was a piece of junk. He then said, "Just take it. I was gonna throw it away." I told him I couldn't do that. He said,"Yeah. People do it all the time." (Take stuff they've thrown away, that is.) I still said I couldn't do that because it would be stealing. He kept saying, "Seriously. I'm going to throw it away. It's trash." Finally he said, "I tell you what. I'll put 10 cents on it and I'll take it up front for you." I could tell he really was going to throw it away if I didn't take it, because he didn't want to mess with it. (And I don't think he wanted me spreading the bits out all over the sidewalk to figure out what was there.) In that condition it wasn't sellable really, and he didn't know what to do with it. So I said ok. I went in and told the clerk. When he brought it up he said he had put 20 cents on it.What do you think I said? "Oh! Well you said 10 cents! Forget it!" Yeah right! The clerk looked at it and said, "That's junk. I'm not gonna charge you 20 cents. I'm charging you 10. Actually, it has to end in 9, so I'm charging you 9." It was 10 cents after tax!
  So I'm reeling. I can't get home fast enough. I'm dying to see if this thing will go back together. I'm also dying to see what all is in the bottom of the box to see if the two things I'm missing from my Dream House are down there. (I'm missing the living room lamp and the tv screen with the Larry the Lion Animal Yakker picture on it.)

So I got it home and started trying to get it back together. When I finished it looked like this:

It's all there! The house that is. The ironic thing? This house is missing the exact same two pieces as my house!! Man!

It has all the furniture and everything except that living room lamp and that one tv screen! What are the odds of that?!

The sliding patio door! My favourite part!

 The second house is way harder to find than the first one. You can hardly give the first one away, while the second one commands a high price. One reason is that the second one is so much cooler than the first one. You can watch the commercial for this Dreamhouse HERE. The first Barbie house is just one room. The second house is cleverly designed so that you can rearrange the rooms.

You can see my other New Dreamhouse HERE,and the Dream Kitchen and Dinette HERE. There's a weird connection between this house and the Kitchen and dinette I got!

There's a bedroom, a kitchen, a living room, and a patio, with built in grill and fold up hedges.There's a closet, kitchen cupboards,and an oven, that all open. And best of all, there's that sliding patio door. That was always my favourite part.When we made Emma a doll house I made sure that one of the things it had was a sliding patio door!

The price the kid wrote on the box.

And my final price!

I'm still trying to figure out how I can fix my house's bad flap with this house.The problem? My house has a bad flap on the bedroom side, and this house has a bad flap on the patio side: same piece of cardboard!

 
  The house also contained these two pieces of vintage Barbie clothing:

And some nice homemade clothes:

I love the things you find in old toys like this. Years ago the kid  who owned this house made a mailbox for it's little inhabitants:

I was wondering aloud what the pill bottle was for. Before I could say it Ivy said it for me: maybe it's the newspaper box.

They also made this wedding invitation:

Barbra, 'Mardge', and Scooter McDorm are invited to...

 "You are invited to our wedding tomorrow at 6:30 pm. Sincerly, Barbie and Don" 'Don'? Who's Don?

That has to be my best find this summer! I had to share it, since no one around here was very excited!
UPDATE: In fact, I was missing TWO tv screens, so I did get one of the ones I was missing from this house. Just not the Larry the Lion one! I also have a Beatles card taped to the screen I had, so I added the non Beatles card one from this house to my house.(Kept the Beatles one though!)