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The master builder of dollhouses Mike McDermott clamps a bedroom window into place in a nearly complete dollhouse. The retired rocket scientist has made about two dozen of the intricate houses, giving most to relatives and donating others for auction at the Providence Festival of Trees. Mail Tribune / Jim Craven Mail Tribune Jim Craven Tuesday Oct 21, 2003 at 2:00 AM Feb 16, 2011 at 9:41 AM JOHN DARLING,for the Mail Tribune A Medford man makes scale models of old-time homes as gifts for his family and community It's not rocket science ' building lovely, intricate dollhouses ' and that's exactly why retired rocket scientist Mike McDermott builds them. It's therapy for me, pure and simple, said McDermott, 62, who is retired from the rocket motor division of Lockheed Martin and teaches physics engineering part time at Southern Oregon University. I build dollhouses because, well, you're actually doing something that will make someone happy ' more so than having a missile coming down on them. McDermott donates a dollhouse each year for auction at the annual Festival of Trees sponsored by Providence Medford Medical Center. The structures bring hundreds to thousands of dollars for hospital projects. Most of the two dozen dollhouses he's built have gone to his two daughters and son and their children. Others have been sold in retail toy outlets in the San Francisco Bay area, where McDermott and his wife, Mary, lived before retirement. — McDermott, a 1959 graduate of Illinois Valley High School, discovered dollhouse building 35 years ago, realizing he would have been pretty happy building real houses. But he did so well in physics that he went on to the University of San Francisco and an advanced degree at the University of Santa Clara. Soon he found himself designing rocket engines for satellite launches, then power plants for the nuclear-tipped Polaris, Poseidon and Trident missiles. Although dollhouse kits are available for several hundred dollars, McDermott has always taken the hard road. He makes everything from scratch, even the tiny shake shingles on power tools usually reserved for much larger jobs. He digs up scrap wood at lumberyards or uses leftovers from outfitting his home, which he designed, with cabinets and an entertainment center. The dollhouses' lap siding is actually cut by tilting a powerful table saw a few degrees and pushing tiny strips through. Shakes are buzzed off stock, one by one, with a band saw. Walls are not framed but consist of two layers of stiff foam glued together. Floors are cut from a 4-by-8-foot sheet of quarter-inch oak plywood, and rooms are often outfitted with wainscoting and wallpaper. His offerings to the Festival of Trees have included a Tudor with timbers and brickwork in 2000, a yellow New England-style home with widow's walk in 2001 and a Georgian with columns and a doortop peak in 2002. This year's donation will be a purple Victorian with dormers and a widow's walk. His work is fabulous, said Festival of Trees director Susan Toner. The detail and definition are spectacular. The lady who bought his dollhouse last year was elated and said she had to have it because it was a replica of her own house and she had to have it for her three daughters. McDermott's dollhouse last year went for & 36;230. His offering this year will be part of the silent auction at the Dec. — formal dinner at the Medford Armory and will go to help build the new Providence breast center. Kids, of course, just love them, McDermott said, but adults are big collectors and love to shop for all the fittings and furniture till they finally get everything just right. McDermott sometimes makes the tiny furniture ' beds, dressers, tables ' for his grandchildren but finds it almost as challenging as building the house itself. He spends several hundred hours over three to five months on each dollhouse. It's fun if you just come and go from it and don't try to get everything done at once, he said. His wife Mary called his work a wonderful gift that's delighted our grandchildren and a lot of other people. When McDermott designed their Medford house, she said she simply couldn't visualize it on paper, so he went into the basement, emerging a few weeks later holding a dollhouse of the home they now live in. Only then, Mary McDermott said, could I see it.