"All little girls love doll houses," testifies Jeannie Napolitano, adding that some grow out of it and some don't. She also asserts that she can easily spot the ones who haven't lost their girlhood love: "They're the ones who ooh and aah over miniatures in store windows and on display at special events." And they also get mesmerized by the plethora of fantasy on display inside the Napolitano house.

"I've loved doll houses all my life," says Jeannie. "But during the Depression years, my family, like most families in America back then, couldn't afford to buy me one."

Finances didn't stop the resourceful young lady from Pennsylvania; undaunted, she made doll-house furniture out of mud. "Of course, when the mud dried, they weren't all that sturdy and durable," she laughs. Jeannie laughs a lot.

Her love of the miniature world stayed with her long after the mud was returned to the earth.

Unfortunately, her first adult foray into construction - this one a joint project some decades back with her young daughter Michelle - met with disaster. "Michelle and I began putting a dollhouse together at my former home on A Avenue. We had it up in her bedroom, on top of a dresser," Jeannie recalls. "Coronado had a horrendous rainstorm, and our flat roof filled with water, collecting in a corner over Michelle's room. We had every bowl we owned collecting water and then we called the fire department!" More laughter.

The fire fighters were terrific, Jeannie affirms gratefully, and they saved the big house from flooding by funneling water out the windows with big canvas sheets that served as catch basins. Alas, the doll house became a casualty of the big flood when one firefighter took it off the dresser and a second took a step back and crushed it.

No insurance on that house.

A few years later, Jeannie rediscovered the diminutive world in a round-about way: she assembled a jigsaw puzzle that was a picture of a shadow box filled with miniatures.

Joe Todaro, her cousin, made Jeannie a shadow box that was a copy of the one in the puzzle. Jeannie visited a miniature store in San Diego and completed the box, and it hangs in her hallway to this day.

Jeannie had caught the dollhouse fever again, and it was egged on by her membership in the San Diego Miniature Crafters Association, which meets monthly in Allied Gardens. Each year, the crafters work on a theme room; this year, it's a library. Each member begins with a basic box, and the club membership - 40 women and one man - will bring their interpretation of the perfect library to life. Jeannie is now busy ordering chairs, a fireplace, flooring and shelves, plus crafting books to fill those shelves. Books, she says, are basically constructed from little blocks of wood with a cover; they are then lined up on a shelf. "But there are women who make full complete books," she adds. "You can turn the pages and some have color pictures on those pages." The library miniatures will be debuted at the 35th annual show and sale - "Nostalgia in Miniatures" - Feb. 2 and 3, at the Al Bahr Shrine on Kearny Villa Road in San Diego. The show is one of many opportunities for show-and-tell of members' creations and also show-and-sell at the accompanying trade show. Each year Jeannie says she's like a kid in a candy store as she peruses the aisles. "They're filled with artists who design dolls, doll clothes, and there are people who do nothing but hats, shoes and purses. They sell at conventions and on the internet - some of the dolls are $500."

"You wouldn't believe the prices they ask for some of these pieces," Jeannie says, rolling her eyes, and noting that completed dollhouses can sell as high as $20,000. While she doesn't make dolls or furniture, Jeannie says, "I do my part in 'supporting' the artists." She adds that her husband, Michel Napolitano, Sr., while admiring her finished pieces, leaves her completely alone in her pursuit of her hobby. "It's a good thing he doesn't know too much," she says with a sly wink.

Michel entered real estate after running Coronado's Day and Night market for decades, founding Napolitano Realty in the 1960s. Today their son, Michel, Jr., owns and runs Napolitano/GMAC Realty. "The boys have always helped people find the home of their dreams," Jeannie says. "I guess I'm sort of in the same business, on a smaller scale."

At her home in the 100 block of G Avenue, Jeannie has converted a former maid's quarters to her workshop. Its large closet is stuffed with her supplies, and the workroom's central table is filled with instruments to help Jeannie piece together her tiny projects.

Michelle often helps her mom with construction details that Jeannie can't quite get her hands around, such as nailing in the tiniest nails. While you'd never know it, based on her good humor and perseverance, Jeannie has had rheumatoid arthritis as her constant companion over the years. Her hobby has been one of the best antidotes for the disease with affects joints, including those of the fingers and wrists, because she becomes so focused on her work that the pain subsides. "A positive attitude is the best way to combat arthritis," Jeannie attests.

Today, the Napolitano house is bursting at the seams to accommodate Jeannie's whimsical creations, all of which have a story to tell. One of her early works was a fairy scene. "All the fairies are playing around a stump in the woods, so I try to place the scene in a central place so kids can walk around it and count the fairies," says Jeannie. Another fantasy is her Boyd Bears: a little boy bear is fishing while a girl bear is making a sandcastle at the beach. She's got a sand bucket on its side and there's a castle scene inside the bucket - a miniature within a miniature. "This was a difficult one to build," Jeannie remembers, "I was working on a multiple scale."

She creates all of her miniatures on a 1:12 scale, one inch equaling one foot. Some crafters work in a quarter-inch-to-one-foot ratio - artists design furniture and dolls to accommodate both scales.

Jeannie's tea room-bakery comes complete with a baker who is carrying a cake across the floor and is about to drop the tiered confection. At her lamp store, every lamp and chandelier lights up.

On a motor home trip some 20 years ago to Mackinaw Island, Michigan, Jeannie and Michel spotted a grocery store kit in a gift store and brought it home. The old-fashioned store is filled with vegetable and fruit bins, a vegetable cart, an inside counter with cash register, eggs in a basket (one of the "eggs" fell out and broke and the yolk is all over the counter), and walls lined with canned goods. Like every well stocked general store, there are shovels and spades for the garden, bagged flour and sugar, bolts of cloth, threads for ladies, even a little wagon out front with "Free Puppies!" inside.

Jeannie often lends "the backyard of my dreams" to the library for display over the summer months. "I saw this kit that had a backyard deck with a Jacuzzi, so I bought it and put it together," she says. "But I kept making the yard bigger, because I always wanted a big back yard and now I have it!" There are director's chairs, a sandbox for the little boy, and a neighbor girl is sticking her hands in the water of the yard's inflatable pool. Mom is doing all the cooking while Dad is in the Jacuzzi - "you know how that goes," Jeannie teases. "I made all the hot dogs and hamburgers, pies and potato salad out of fimo modeling clay - I made the raw burgers red, and the ones on the grill, brown."

Santa's Workshop is one of Jeannie's favorites. She first bought the elves from an artist she met at a convention - "I bought every one she had made over the years and then I built the house around them." One elf is making a teddy bear, stuffing the tummy with hair; another is making a dollhouse (of course); another is sitting at a sewing machine making clothes for Santa. Other elves are busy decorating the tree and wrapping toys and a very naughty elf is taking a bubble bath. Santa's got his bag filled with toys and Mrs. Claus is wrapping presents. But make no mistake - it was Jeannie who wrapped every one of them. "And they all had teeny weenie little bows," she sighs.

Jeannie has just finished an eightyear project: a three-story doll house, which occupies the Napolitano's living room window, housing a family that is alive in Jeannie's imagination. Its residents are a young couple and their toddler son who is sitting on the kitchen floor eating a sandwich with jelly all over his face. Jeannie's kitchen features waxed paper, rolling pins, and an open refrigerator and freezer because Mom is emptying bags of groceries while Dad is sitting in a chair with the grocery receipt. "It took so long because I had so many other projects going," she confesses.

Not surprisingly, Jeannie's has another project in the works: she purchased a huge dollhouse at a show. "It was specially made for a family who wanted it fashioned after their family home. Then the family changed its mind. After a second owner never worked on it, Jeannie acquired the house. "It's gorgeous, whole wings open up."

And she can't hold her enthusiasm for another new acquisition: "It's this beautiful old-fashioned pool table. It even has nets for the balls. It really belongs in a Victorian home. I suppose it will need an entire new house around it," she muses.

And visions of that fantasy are already dancing in Jeannie's head.