A place in which to live
smaller scale. I added flashing around it with more wine-bottle foil. The fin- ishing touch for this smaller house was a mailbox made of styrene strip at- tached just to the left of the front door so the family can stay in touch with the rest of the world and get their bills.
The addition’s siding does not match the house, a nice touch. Clotheslines, garbage cans and the bike by the garage (a simple scratchbuilding project) give a lived-in look.
The single car garage was the last addition to the project.
The garage is constructed with the
same clapboard siding as the bathroom addition. It measures 13 by 20 feet and is ten feet high at the peak. The door opening is 8′-6″×7′-6″ and is framed with Northeastern 4″×4″’s. I also used Northeastern stripwood for the trim on the rest of the building. The swinging doors are scribed sheetwood hung with Grandt Line hinges. The paint color for the garage and house is another long- gone Floquil military shade called Kha- ki; there are other shades that are close. The windows on each side are from Grandt Line. The sub-roof is made from cardstock, and it is covered with black construction paper painted with Floquil Weathered Black and weath- ered to replicate asphalt roofing paper. I used a Sharpie® marker to simulate tar joints and created nail impressions with a pounce wheel. As I was working on the garage, I also
was recalling my childhood and realized there was a need for a basketball hoop over the garage door like the one that Jay, Phil and numerous other friends and I used in our attempts at lay ups and jump shots. For the 3′-0″×4′-0″ backboard I cut a piece of leftover ply- wood from the house kit to size. It is braced with a couple of 4″×4″’s. For the 18″-diameter hoop I used a correctly- sized drill bit to carefully form a length of .018″ brass wire into a circle. I man- aged to solder the wire together, then bent a small piece of wire to shape for a mounting bracket and soldered it to the hoop. A drop of gap-filling cyanoacrylate
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cement secured the hoop at the proper 10′-0″ height. The net is a length of wed- ding veil material carefully glued into place. Yes, I know that a proper net is tighter at the bottom, but I couldn’t see how to manage that and besides, as kids we were lucky to have a net at all. Using Liquid Nails®, I mounted the buildings on a twelve-inch square sheet of ¹/₈″ plywood that I found at a local Michael’s store. The driveway and front walk paving are distressed, painted and weathered lengths of thin sheet styrene. The ground cover is a base layer of fine green Woodland Scenics turf covered with another layer of coarser ground foam to give some texture and get away from the golf green look. On the layout the house will sit next to a gas station, so there will be a Bar Mills Models board fence separating the two (but the fence will be attached to this scenic base). The clothesline is
doweling and thread attached on one end to the garage wall, just as ours was at home. The figures are from Artista and Gram on the porch, sitting in her rocker, is about to get up and take a walk with the elderly couple on the front walk as Mum sweeps the steps. So there you have it. By adding to and modifying a couple of kits I have created two appropriate houses for families residing in the O scale towns of Strong and Albion. This was a fun and not terribly demanding project that reactivated my interest in local ar- chitecture. It really got me thinking about the houses and neighborhood where I grew up. In this hobby, to some extent at least, we are all historians, and much of our enjoyment comes from trying to preserve the heritage and en- vironment around us. What better way to do this than recreating the sur- roundings of our childhood?
MAY 2012
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