These are pictures of our new homemade TARDIS. It wasn’t actually made for a party, but I thought it would be a nice thing to include on this blog because it’s a great Doctor Who themed party idea.
How much it costs and how long it takes is going to depend on what materials are available. Fortunately ours cost next to nothing as the only thing we didn’t have was the light and the door handles, both of which were cheap to buy.
Here is what we used:
* A large, unused TV cabinet - It was just sitting unloved in the toy shed so I decided to put it to better use! Obviously not many people have a large TV cabinet they aren’t using conveniently lying around, but you can buy them in second hand shops, boot sales, charity shops, etc for very little. Or if you are fairly confident with a saw, a hammer and some nails you can buy some wood from a DIY store and construct the box yourself.
* Wooden trimming (for the door panels)
* Scrap wood (for embellishing the top of the TARDIS).
* Paint - We happened to have a nice dark blue paint (“Dramatic” by Crown) left over from painting a feature wall in littlest boy’s bedroom. It took barely any paint at all to put a couple of coats on the TARDIS, so if you don’t have anything suitable already you’ll probably only need a very small pot of paint. Even poster paint might do (£1 - £2 for a large bottle), depending on the wood you are using.
* Door handles - We bought a cheap multipack of value door handles for about £2.50.
* Light - We used a circular handheld torch which cost less than £5.
This is how we went about making our TARDIS:
1) First of all we removed the doors and chopped off the legs of the TV cabinet, and turned it on its side.
2) We took out the two shelves, cut them to size and used hinges to hang them on the front as the TARDIS’s doors.
3) Using wood trimming we created a panel effect on the doors, using tiny nails to hold them in place. The TARDIS actually has eight panels, but the size of the cabinet meant compromising and having only six.
4) To create the POLICE BOX sign we cut some scrap wood to size and fixed it to the top of the TARDIS.
5) Using more scrap, we hammered two blocks of wood on top, slightly smaller than the top of the TV cabinet, to create the shape of the roof of the TARDIS.
6) We painted the TARDIS with two coats of blue paint.
7) Once this was dry I painted the windows with black acrylic paint.
8) Then we added the door handles.
9) Next we added the Police Box sign, the public notice and the St John’s ambulance symbol. The public notice was done on Word, the Police Box sign made on Paint Shop Pro (I used Sergoe Script), and I found a St John’s ambulance clip art via Google Images. The Police Box sign had to be constructed from 3 separate images, each roughly the width of a page of A4.
10) Finally, we put the light on top. The back is magnetic so it sticks to the top of a nail we used to hold the wood in place on top of the TV cabinet.
My boys love it. As you can see in the third picture, my eldest has decorated it with posters from the Doctor Who Adventures magazine!
