Kitbashing dollhouse elements (mixing kits)

It means combining parts from two or more kits (or kits plus scratch-built bits) to make something neither kit offers on its own. I might take the staircase from one kit, the windows from another, and build my own walls around them. The point is to escape the look of a kit built straight from the box, which other miniaturists recognise instantly. It is the fastest route to a build that feels like yours.

The same scale, yes, almost always. The same brand, no. Mixing 1:12 parts from different makers works fine as long as the scale matches, though you will sometimes need to shim or sand to make joints meet, since tolerances differ between manufacturers. I keep a caliper on the desk to check part dimensions before committing, because a window that is 2mm off looks wrong even when you cannot say why.

Two-part epoxy putty (Milliput is my go-to) for structural gaps, smoothed with a wet finger before it cures. For fine seams, a tube of model filler like Tamiya Putty sanded back once dry. The trick most beginners miss is that filler shrinks slightly as it dries, so I slightly overfill, let it cure fully overnight, then sand flush. Rushing the sanding while it is still soft tears the surface.

A little, mostly because you lose the instructions and have to solve fit problems yourself. The building skills are the same. What changes is that you become the designer, which means more planning and more dry-fitting before glue touches anything. I dry-fit an entire bashed structure with tape or sticky tack first, photograph it, and only then start gluing. That habit saves more failed builds than any tool.