I got this idea when visiting the Ghibli Park in Nagoya this summer where they recreated a whole bunch of anime scenes from Ghibli movies, including this Kusakabe's House from Totoro. The picture was taken in front of that house (no picture allowed inside) with my 7 yo standing in front of the house 😊 I did see a plastic model of the house for sale in the Ghibli gift shop, asking for 70,000+ yen or $500+ tax or something, which is way over my budget T_T

After returning home, I decided to make a project to recreate that house with my beloved Bambu and hopefully for a fraction of the cost. This is the first part of that effort. The Kitchen and Bath section is essentially a somewhat add-on piece to the Kusakabe house, and that's where the girls first discovered the Susuwatari. This part (without the roof/gutter) turned out to be about 700g of filament, the entire house should be 10 times of that I expect. starts to rack up to $100+ but still a good deal compared to the retail, and plus, I find myself learning a lot about tricks in making 3D parts assembleable, and exploring the various ways to make moveable asseblies like the doors and windows brought me back to my college days, so definitely a fun experience so far.

I did find a mesh model on the entire kusakabe house, which is incredibly detailed (see link / license at the bottom), so I didn't have to start from zero. This gave me a starting point for the relative positioning of objects and the general sizes, but in order to make it 3D printable, I basically had to redraw the entire house from the ground up, removing overly delicate features to fit the printer nozzle, break objects apart to avoid ugly overhand or support, add mechanisms to allow movement etc.

For the most part, the assembly is straight forward, and you should be able to figure out how to put this together yourself with some gluing. here're some basic instructions.

1. to avoid overhang / support which looks ugly, I took the door panel and the window grills out, so you need to insert them from the side, and glue the vertical grill on in the end. the hinge is basically a 1.75 filament through the door frame.
2. be very careful when removing the supports for the sink. the legs are thin and easy to break (but nothing a super-glue can't fix)
3. the inner wall that separates Kitchen and Bath has some ugly overhangs, i might end up redesigning it. if you don't like how it turned out, don't glue it on so you can swap it out with a future release
4. there's a big and small piece on the dugout plate. the big one is the actual dugout that goes under bathtub. the small one is to be glued anywhere near the back door, so the model can stand on its own.
5. the bathroom swing door is similar to the back door, stick a filament long enough from the bottom of the door frame, and glue on the handles.
6. i have reserved two spots for additional walls, this is for future project when connecting to the main building.
7. the slide windows, you just bend the windows a bit and insert into the v-grooves on the frame.

leave me a comment if you run into any issues putting this together.

https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/kusakabe-house-my-neighbor-totoro-1a3f26eb5ec64314a821ecee73f90613

"Kusakabe House (My Neighbor Totoro)" (https://skfb.ly/oKJrA) by scourdx is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).