As a Christmas present my wife gave a the Scale Structures Limited model, Dorothy’s House.  This is a cardstock and cast metal craftsman model of a brick house with all of the fancy “gingerbread” decorations.

Upon first opening the box it was slightly intimidating to see the sheer amount of parts, which were separated into different bags.

I read the instructions completely and then dove into the kit.  The first step was to indentify the walls and floors and cut them from the rest of the cardstock parts.  I then used 3M contact cement to glue the “wallpaper” onto the inside of the walls:

In the picture you can see the large amount of parts in their respective bags.  Also you can see how I turned the pieces right side up so that I could trim the wallpaper to fit the panels.

Once I had put the wallpaper on all of the walls I was able to start construction.  I used the the magnetic jig from Micro-Mark to assist in building the walls. By using waxpaper in the jig I was able to easily remove the model once the glue had dried.  Per the suggestions in the manual I did not glue the back wall (the large one) in place as I want to be able to remove it to add furniture and people at a later date.

For glueing the walls to the floor panels and each other I used Elmer’s Wood Glue.  The 3M blue painters tape was very helpful in holding the various wall panels together while drying.

In the next post I will show how I completed the remaining wall panels and installed the floors.

Before completing the chalk weathering on the model I painted the metal parts with silver paint.  Over this I dry-brushed a rust color, adding heavy color where it would be likely for rust to form.  Once this had dried I used the chalk to blend in the areas and add even more rust color to the metal.

One of the other final steps was to fill in the small gap on the upper window by using white glue.  This had the effect of filling in the gap, but was able to be hidden by the weathering so that it was not noticeable.  Once all of this had dried I coated the entire model with Dullcote to protect all of the weathering.  On most models I would have done this before installing the windows as it take away the clarity, however in this case I wanted the windows to be slightly opaque so that you  were not able to see inside the building.

Once this building was complete I donated it to the San Leandro Historic Railway society to be used as a generic industrial building on our layout.  This building served as my “try piece” and landed me the job of working with another member to create the buildings for the Selby area of the layout (Selby, CA during the 1950’s contained a lead smelter and not far from there is the C&H sugar plant).  I will provide pictures of this current building and any future buildings in that area as they are built.

After wiping off the excess paint to color the grout in between the bricks I glued the acetate on the window frames and doors.  The reccomendation from most sources is to use some form of white glue to hold it in place, but as I intended to weather the building so that the glass would not really be clear anyways, I used Zap-a-Gap.  This allowed me to install the “glass” much faster than using white glue would have done.  Here is a picture of the building after all the windows and doors had been installed:

The next step was to airbrush a layer of dirt on the building.  Unfortunatly for me I did not thin out the paint far enough so it ended up leaving some rather large splatters.  This ended up working out in the long run as I then used chalk to blend everything together.  Here is a picture showing the roof with one side showing the airbrush and the other showing the chalk blending it in:

I also used chalk to blend on the rest of the building, using a piece of sandpaper to grind the chalk into a fine powder.  I usually use a couple of different colors and use the application brush to blend them.  Here is a picture showing work on the walls of the building:

As you can see in the picture, I also used the chalk on the windows which had the effect of making them very hard to see through (just like most industrial buildings that I see in Oakland, CA).

After doing a little research I found a couple of different techniques, the best of which I found on the NMRA website.  This technique was to paint the walls a brick color, using an airbrush.  Once that had dried I mixed up a batch of watered down white paint.  I brushed this over the wall, covering about one third of the wall.

After allowing it to dry for about one minute I used a rag (an old T shirt) and wiped off the majority of the paint.  This had the affect of removing the white paint off the bricks, leaving the white in the mortar lines.  I was  very pleased with the look, especially considering how quick and easy it was.  Here is the picture of the results:

As you can see it is very bright, but I intend to airbrush and use chalk to complete the look.

I recently started working on a plastic model, the Bakery from ConCor.  It is a rather simple kit, representing a brick building with large windows.  I chose this building since it looks similar to many of the old commercial buildings around Oakland, CA.

I was rather surprised upon opening the box and finding a model molded in a shiny dark blue, and the detail parts in a bright green.  I almost gave up right there, until I looked a little closer and noticed the fine detail molded into the walls of the kit.  I quickly cleaned the parts and assembled them in the magnetic jig, as shown in the last post.  Here is a picture of the assembled walls in the jig:

After using a solvent type glue to assemble the major parts of the model I primed the building inside and out, using a gray primer.  My first attempt at painting the brick was to drybrush the brick color directly over the primer, with rather poor results (still kinda blue).

After this rather poor result I went to the internet for ideas to paint the bricks.  I visited the NMRA website for ideas, which I will discuss in the next post.