Once I had completed installing all of the windows, I began work on the roof.  My first step was to use and x-acto knife and trim all of the roof panels so that the seams were fairly straight and smooth.  I found that a slight sawing motion provided the best results.  Do not worry about small divots and such as they will be covered by the copper roofing paper.  Any large gaps I filled with squadron putty (I used a little green, but found that as it was an old tube, it was really hard, so then I switched to the white).

After filing down all of the filled areas and any other rough areas I masked everything  but the roof sections so that I could use contact cement.  As I have mentioned in previous posts I prefer using 3M’s super 77.

After waiting a couple of miniatures I installed the strips for the copper roofing.  I only installed it on the Mansard sections of the roof as per the directions.  At each corner I used a strip of the cardstock to cover each gap.  As you can see I used the Scotch blue painters tape to hold each of the strips into place.

After cleaning all of the castings, using an x-acto knife and a selection of jeweler’s files I primed and painted the window and door castings.  Once the paint had dried I cut the clear plastic to the correct size by using a razor knife and a steel ruler.  I attached them to the window frame by carefully using zap-a-gap.  I have heard of the technique of using white glue to reduce “crazing’ of the clear plastic, but I used a micro brush to spread the glue.  Using this technique I had fairly good results with only a little fog on a couple of windows.

After waiting a short time for the glue on the clear plastic to dry I test fitted and then glued the window frames into place.  The test fit was very important to make sure that each window fit correctly and was square.  The only mistake that I made in doing this was to not fill the larger openings while I was installing the windows.  This left a couple of small gaps which will be very difficult to fill later on, however I think that I should be able to hide them by using “ivy” along some of the windows.

Once I had all of the brick paper glued into place, and the windows and door openings had been cut out, I started working on the roof.   I made sure to test the fit of each piece before gluing it in place using the Elmer’s wood glue.

Going back to cutting out the windows, I found that the easiest way to do this was to stab in the general area of the window with a hobby knife, and carefully cut around the edge of the cardstock.  I also found that using a slight sawing motion had the best results.

For the mansard portion of the roof the overlap on the panels match the placement of the wall panels below.  After gluing all of the mansard sections I glued the top in place, and once it had dried I used a hobby knife and cut top to match the panels as needed.  Installing the tower panels brought about quite a lot of cutting and fitting.  There was one panel with a bit of overlap at the final part, but once I had tapered them  into each other it balanced out.  The top section was very challenging as the pieces did not fit together very well.  I had to make slight adjustments to two of the large pieces, and had to custom cut panels for the D and E sections.  In hind-sight it might have been easier to cut a little bit from each of the other panels to make them fit, however it looks OK.

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Doing the top portion of the roof in this way most likely made the pitch of the upper roof different than the kit, but looking at examples elsewhere it is not an issue.

While the brick paper was drying I used 3M Super 77 Contact Cement to glue a 3′ scale strip of the foundation paper to each wall panel.  After this had dried I first painted the brick a brown color, using a PolyScale paint.

This became a problem later when I attempted to wash the brick with the white paint for the mortar.  Wiping this off ended up taking most of the brown paint with it.

I ended up moving on to installing the rest of the brick paper, but later painted the foundation a gray color later as the brown did not look good with the color of the brick.

I cut the brick paper to the correct height and length.  By carefully measuring I was able to score the back of each angle so that it would lay correctly.  The time spent doing this was well worth the effort as it took form made with cardboard walls and made it impossible to tell once the paper was in place.  I used the 3m contact cement to stick it in place, after I had masked the foundation and insides.

My project over the last couple of days has been to prepare the brick paper.  The first step was to paint each sheet of the brick paper with Floquil Oxide Red.  I used a fairly wide brush, but in the future I think I will use an airbrush as I finally bought an air-compressor.  An airbrush would have made the painting go much quicker and would have given better control over the thickness and coverage of the sheet.

Once this had dried (I waited until the next day, but you could probably do it in a couple of hours) I used a wash of Cermicote off white.  I thinned it with about 3 droppers of water mixed in.  I started by using the wash on only a quarter of the sheet at a time, but by the time I got to the last sheet I would do it in much larger sections without any problems.  Letting the wash dry for only a couple min I used a rag (I used an old t-shirt) and wiped most of it off of the paper.  I varied the directions in which I wiped it so that the wall would develop different patterns to the color of the brick.

After allowing the wash to dry for a couple of hours I sealed it with a quick coat of Testor’s Dullcote.