Scratch building a model house
Quite a few years back before I moved house I decided to draw up some plans of my house. I walked round the outside with a tape measure and recorded all of the distances and then drew then up to the scale of about 1:76 which is 00 gauge for model railways. I have a small railway layout which is nowhere near finished and has laid abandoned for a good while at this scale.
A while after drawing the plans I decided to actually try and scratch build the house, scratch building was obviously the only possibility since there is not a kit, also the house is a fairly unusual shape so a conversion wouldn’t work.
I started off by buying a bit of brickwork which is embossed plastic. I soon set about cutting this to shape which wasn’t the easiest of jobs since the tiles I had bought, although very nice quality were about 1.5mm thick which makes it difficult to cut out small windows with a craft knife. It hasn’t come out too badly and hopefully I will be able to disguise most of the bad points with a bit of paint and some filler.
At this point the work stopped for a while since I hadn’t ever actually made a building at this point, not even from a kit so I got a bit stuck, having no roof and the prospect of trying to glue together these rather roughly cut pieces of plastic wasn’t inviting. I have since trimmed the plastic into a somewhat better state.
Later on I visited the Warley National Model Railway Exhibition which was very good. Here I saw a man who had created some wonderful buildings in 0 gauge which is a bit larger than 00. I took most of his ideas and am using them to build my model.
For the main structure of the house foam centred board is used. This consists of foam sandwiched by a piece of card either side, making it very light which still remaining rigid and fairly strong. This is fairly easy to cut with a craft knife although it is harder than you would think to get it nice. It definitely looked easier when the man at the show did a demonstration.
I pinned and glued this together which formed a structurally solid building. I will be able to stick the brickwork onto the outside of this later on in the process.
Importantly this structure gave me a base for the roofing tiles. I again used the method shown at the show which is; to take paper/card depending on the scale and then cut a series of slits the right width for the tiles. I used graph paper from an old exercise book which was fairly thick paper and the graph paper is excellent because you can see how far apart the slits should be. You then cut off a strip with the slits on one side and a solid strip on the other so you can pick it up as one piece.
Then you can simply lay the strips on the roof, starting from the bottom and overlapping them so that only the slits are shown. This creates the proper effect because this is how tiles are laid on a real roof. The first time I tried this the lines kept going wonky so I scrapped the area and stuck graph paper over the entire roof which now acts as guidelines to keep it horizontal and maintain proper spacing.
This process is time consuming since a lot of little cuts need to be made and they must also be laid carefully onto the roof making sure that they are straight. I am in the middle of the process currently and have about a third of the roof done and probably about enough strips cut to get me past half way. After this is done things should quickly progress to the stage where I can paint since the tiling is already cut to shape.
Here is a picture showing the model, The garage is missing form the near end which is why there is a gap. I found that since it is connected via a narrow strip it was better to work without it attached.
