Linda Willard feels as if God taps her on the shoulder every now and then. This time, she said, it came in the form of a phone call from a daughter asking what to do with a dollhouse kit languishing in the attic.
About 1½ years back, Willard was having health problems. She felt awful. She was jumpy. She couldn't get comfortable sitting. She couldn't get comfortable standing. Her head was muddy, and she couldn't concentrate well enough to stick with a book or TV show.
She had been saying to herself, "I have got to find something to keep my hands busy and keep my mind off myself" when one of her four daughters called to say that, while cleaning out the attic, she had come upon the dollhouse kit that had been a gift from Willard and wanted to know what to do with it.
Willard, 76, had given it to a granddaughter some years back with the idea of their putting it together. The granddaughter had outgrown dollhouses before they got around to it, though, and the kit had just been sitting there.
"A light went off in my head," Willard said.
Putting it together might be just the project she had been looking for. Willard said she would take it. She was right. The project turned out to be something she could do and that she thoroughly enjoyed.
"It just clicked," she said.
From there, she moved on to two dilapidated dollhouses that another daughter bought on eBay, the online auction site. Willard has long been handy with tools. If a dollhouse needed new windows, she got out her saws and made windows. When it came time to furnish the houses, she made beds out of popsicle sticks.
She has since taken on such other dollhouse projects as refurbishing a dollhouse that has been in a friend's family for years and turning a dollhouse-size castle for knights into a castle for a princess. Her princess started life as a McDonald's giveaway toy.
A big part of the fun has been digging around in all the stuff she accumulated over the years -- "I have been a pack rat for years" -- and finding things that she could use. A doily became a bedspread. With its clip removed, an earring became a bowl of fruit for a dollhouse table.
"It's doing something with nothing," she said.
She has also gotten lots of satisfaction out of going treasure hunting at craft and thrift stores. Not all finds are perfect fits, and she enjoys figuring out a way to make something work. The dollhouse-size chest of drawers she bought on clearance was too tall for the room where she wanted to put it. She cut it down and turned the top drawer into a toy chest. Another chest of drawers became a kitchen range.
She's mostly better now but she is having too much fun on dollhouses to stop. Next up is a dollhouse based on the shotgun house she lived in growing up in Cooleemee.
Lots of people know Willard as the Cake Lady. The nickname comes from her days working in real estate. There was a time when she baked 150 birthday cakes a year -- 90 for the people in the office and another for 60 other people in her life.
Now, she has become such a familiar figure at the Goodwill store on Coliseum that employees have given her a new nickname.
"They call me the Dollhouse Lady," Willard said.
■ Kim Underwood can be reached at 727-7389 or at kunderwood@wsjournal.com.
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