From the Warhammer Lake-town house interior to a fully scratch-built version

[PhilB]

The project is progressing... but there remains so much to do.





I spent an inordinate amount of time on the door, especially since it'll be barely seen under the cantelievered overhang. But that's what obsession with details will get you. The door handle is a section of spring from a ball-point pen glued behind a tiny half-section of the plastic inner pen tube itself. Notice in the second pic that it... opens! I racked my brain trying to figure out how to mount the door so that it opens, and finally hit on this: two pins. One pin is cut in half & glued to the bottom edge of the door with about 1.5mm of the pointy end sticking out. A corresponding hole was made in the floor by the door jamb. A second pin is glued to the top of the door so that its head projects some 9mm above the door - the exact thickness of the wall above the door. A thin grove was cut in the underlying card structure to hold the pin, then another card was glued across the top (as the lintel) but *not* glued around the pin itself, allowing it to turn.

In the meantime I also painted the windows, using the card sections I cut out, trimming them slightly to fit, scoring where the mullions and muntins would go, then tarting up the panes with several shades of blue, and the mullions themselves with two shades of brown. Then, after all that work, I glued the side window in... upside down! Much hair pulling ensued, but I used enough superglue that I would destroy the window trying to remove it. It will remain an object lesson in paying attention when you cut or glue!



So, on to the second floor! I decided to have the front and sides lean out just slightly, like 2cm over the 40cm height of the side walls. I was a wee bit leery of expressly building something not to be square, but it turned out all right. I first glued the beams around the edge of the floor, then used them to help position the cards used for the walls. The other beams were only glued on afterwards, each time measured in situ so as to fit. I doubt I could've calculated in advance the exact lengths or placement of any of those beams, they just fell into place around the windows I'd cut prior to assembly.



Another word about the interior: these Rackham terrain tiles were a real godsend for me when I first picked them up some years back, and they make for a very vivid interior, even without modelling furniture and interior walls. Of course I plan to do both, but they still look nice. And they only required a bit of editing to fit my project. For the walls, however, I realized I'd grown tired of the exposed wickerwork on the ground floor (a bit too extreme for a house that folks live in, especially since all it takes to repair wicker and daub walls is a bucket of mud!) and so searched the web for some other half-timbered textures. I finally found one whose plasterwork was very nearly the shade of ochre I'd chosen for the exterior, so that one it was. I planned the windows according to those shown on the Rackham tile, and just remembered in the nick of time *not* to cut out the windows in the back facade, as that's where the chimney will rise to the roof!

Speaking of the roof, I must have spent six hours perusing different methods for roof construction from various tutorials on the web. I thought about trying to recast the roof from my second Warhammer Lake-town house, but I've never done any casting and was a bit leery of jumping off that bridge just now. So I settled on the time-honored method of cutting out thin strips of shingles from some thin card (old medicine boxes I'd been saving and had already used on some scratch-built wagons) and then gluing them in layers to the underlying roof card (more bank calendars were sacrificed to this project than I would've thought!).





I know you're all eager to see the final painted-up results. So am I! But there's a game of Pathfinder on tonight, and I'm bringing pizza, so the morning will be spent kneading dough and cooking rather than painting. <heavy sigh>

So, what's left? I've got to add another 90mm of chimney to the bit I've got started. It's my first attempt at using a hot wire cutter. That thing melts polystyrene fast! Some of the cuts were far too deep, but I think I'm going to keep this first chimney as is, and it still needs a few layers of paint.



I'll also need to do more interior walls, doors and windows, a stairway to upstairs (d@mn! I forgot to cut out the floor in advance!), the furniture, and then the exterior terrain around the building's base. I kind of wish I'd planned on doing a visible stone foundation, or even a stone first floor... but my planning hadn't got that far when I started this project.
Any suggestions or comments from you folks would be greatly appreciated.

[Tordenskjold]

Ohh! Those shingles are really nice. Thanks for taking the tie to explain the method!

Eagerly awaiting the painted up version 

[PhilB]

The half-timbered house is progressing nicely!



Here you can see the completed roof with a dark grey paintjob. I gave the whole roof several coats of grey wash (with a hint of blue - but I should've used a bigger hint!) then painted several shades of highlights on each individual shingle. 4 hours of work there! Now it's done, I'm convinced I should've made it a lot lighter (and bluer) to simulate slate shingles... but I'm not going to repaint it. Next time!

You can also see in this picture a shortcoming of painting the two floors at separate times. The ground floor exterior walls are much lighter that the second floor. I'll need to give them another coat, using the same color.



On the rear facade you can see a design problem. I never thought about why chimneys usually rise to an off-center position next to the roof peak. Instead, I put my chimney right up the center, and it was only when I got to the roof that I realized I had the top roof beam coming out right in the middle of the chimney. Oh well. Next time I'll get it right! Again, the hot foam cutter made for really rough work. Next chimney will need to be carved with an xacto knife, I think. But this one will do, despite its deep, deep groves between stones.



Here you can see the interior walls on the second floor. All the interior walls were printed on paper and glued to the card base, and I like this texture much better than the one I used on the first floor. I learnt my lesson about preparing the interior walls, though, and did all the painting prior to gluing those walls in place.



In this view of the second floor interior, you can see the doors open. I decided to try a different method of hinging the doors, simply using paper hinges. It won't be as durable as the pin method I used on the ground floor front door, but it was certainly easier to implement.

So, what remains to be done?
- Add another coat to all the exterior walls so the upper floor and the ground floor have the same base hue.
- Scupt the interior fireplaces to correspond to the placement of the chimneys.
- Make a stairway from the ground floor and cut out a piece of the intervening floor to accept the rising stairs. I should've cut that gap out before assembly. Oops!
- Paint the upper floor windows and position them right side up this time. <g>
- Make all the furniture for both upstairs and downstairs.

Any suggestions or comments?

[Ogrob]

Looks really good!

[tomrommel1]

stunning indeed .

[Psychoflexible]

  Masterpiece !!!

[PhilB]

Thanks for the comments!
I'm moving part of this thread over to the Workbench forum, to talk about rivets and woodgrain. And also to ask questions about board thickness and climbing ivy. I'll come back here in a month or so with pics of the finished house set up as a tavern, complete with patrons.

http://leadadventureforum.com/index.php?topic=103061.0

[roadskare63]

HAHA!!!!!!!!!!!!!...Man!!...that is looking GOOD !!!......Lovin all the neat details and stuff you are working into the scratchbuild.

[boneio]

That's looking lovely. Characterful and deliberately imperfect, if that makes sense.

[PhilB]

That's looking lovely. Characterful and deliberately imperfect, if that makes sense.

Yes, that's exactly what I was going for. Apart from the design error of putting the chimney straight up the middle and intersecting the ridge beam. <sigh>

I wanted to make the roof sag slightly, but when I made that decision, I had already glued the shingles on, so it couldn't be too much. I cut out a curve in each of the roof panels along the top,  curving down in the middle about 3mm. It's really too slight to be noticeable if you're not looking for it, but it still gives it a little character-ful touch.

The other thing I think I should've done differently was that I didn't fill in the spaces between the wood beams on the façades. They should be plastered flush or nearly so with the beams, but I just painted the underlying card walls as if they were plastered. It's not jarring, as such, but this kind of a project is really a learning experience. Next time will be better!

I'm away from home right now, but my next step will be to finish the furniture, add inside fireplaces, and do the windows. I'm not sure how I'll go with the windows. The shadows show a diamond-shaped latice of window panes (not sure what that's really called) and several solutions present themselves:

1) I could do like I did on the ground floor windows: scribe lines in the card I cut from the windows, paint the panes in variable blue tones and paint the muntins (are they still called muntins in a diamond-shaped small pane design?) with shadowed undersides.

2) Use some appropriately-sized screening for the windows, and stretch watered-down PVA over the gaps to dry as translucent panes.

3) Use photocopier transparencies and print the diamond-shaped muntin design, then leave the windows transparent.

The first method is the only one I've tried so far. I saved and labelled all the card pieces I cut out, so they would be exact fits. The second and third methods are stuff I gleaned off youtube. Should I use the first method so as to retain consistency of design with the already completed ground floor? Who can comment on the other two methods? Or has anyone got a better idea?

[boneio]

Apart from the design error of putting the chimney straight up the middle and intersecting the ridge beam. <sigh>

Shouldn't have admitted that, I thought it was a neat touch! Like the builders put the chimney on afterwards and just thought 'ehhh, let's just build around this beam'.

I've used wire mesh for windows in the past, but haven't tried the PVA glue trick - sounds fiddly and prone to damage but may look good?

[Quendil]

Very impressive, will be following this thread