Doris muses on the possibility to turn a hobby into a job.
I may not have mentioned that my niece, Josephine, has got me interested in making little house models. An ideal hobby in times of quarantine, you are sent an insanely detailed kit with hundreds of pieces in different materials, which you painstakingly assemble. All the while thinking either “what a good idea this was” or “what on earth does the factory look like where they put these kits together”.
Let me dig out a couple of photos from earlier this year to show you what I mean:
The first time you do one it takes quite a while to work out what is going on and master some of the fiddly bits of technique but the end result is highly satisfying (you build the house too as well as the furniture, btw). This one took maybe 30-50 hours, I wasn’t counting.
These kits are around £30-40 if you buy them in the UK but Josephine tells me they are very much cheaper if you buy them in China – I believe around a third of that price. There is only one serious downside which is that over time your home will fill up with little houses, or, in the case of my latest project, little caravans.
So why am I telling you this?
Well, first let me show you two pictures that I took in Monet’s House, really just to show you how gloriously empty the rooms were of other tourists, but also they are nice photos in their own right:
And then – I am finally getting to the point – let me show you what I found in Ye Olde Monet Gifte Shoppe at the end of the tour:
Mini rooms! And look at the price – €164 for the kitchen and an eye-watering €800 for the living room.
These are very nicely put together, but actually so was mine, and I bet I’d speed up if I did a couple more. Someone, somewhere, is making a great deal of money out of this. My calculations for the yellow room are: (the blue one is much smaller and simpler)
Kit: maybe £10-20 max wholesale
Labour: 20-30 hours once you have got the hang of it, maybe much less if you have clever young nimble fingers and sharp eyesight.
Frame and glass: £15? (The rest of the room is all part of the kit.)
AND the good news is that you get rid of the damn’ things at the end of the project.
Doris And Josephine Enterprises Ltd™ are standing by to take your orders…