After assembling the major structures I decided to permanently attach the smaller building to the larger building.  I didn’t like how the kit had it as two separate buildings.  I removed the shorter wall on the smaller structure and fitted it against the larger one.  I used some of the scrap pieces to fill in the gaps, covered with putty.  After waiting for the putty to dry, I touched up the joints.

I started the painting the brick by using white paint and creating a wash.  After letting it dry for a couple of minutes I used a rag and wiped the paint from the bricks, leaving it in the mortar.

The picture above shows the wash in place before being wiped off.  The following picture shows the walls after I have wiped off the excess paint.  As you can see it stays fairly bright, but this will be taken care of by using chalks to bring down the tone and making it dirty.

As you can see in this picture I used old t-shirts as rags, something that I have a large supply of as part of my job includes welding

The next step was too put a primer coat on all of the major pieces.  I did not worry too much about the inside as I don’t intend on putting any interiors into these buildings.  My reasoning on this is that most of the commercial buildings I see are so coated in dirt and grime that you can’t see anything through the windows anyways.

I found a useful trick when spray painting, a way of curing drips from too heavy of spray (it can happen to anyone who is not paying enough attention).  I used canned air to spread the drips out, making it almost impossible to see where they had been.   I suppose that this technique might work with airbrushing as well (just turn the paint off and spray) but I hope not to need it.

Once the primer had dried I airbrushed the brick color onto the walls.  In the process of this I managed to run out of my primary color and had to go to the hobby store to get more.  Unfortunatly they were out of the exact color.  I chose a couple of other similar colors and used them to fill in as needed.  In the long run this actually helped in that it changed the color of the brick in different areas, helping out with the weathering.  It took me about 3 coats to get the red to completely cover the primer color.

I think that this picture was taken after the second coat, as it shows some bare patches near the top.

I assembled the back porch following the directions.  The cut out piece seemed to fit a little bit strange so I had to do some cutting to get it to fit correctly.  I used Elmer’s wood glue to hold the pieces together.  In the foreground of the picture you can see how I framed the porch with scale lumber, and after it had dried I used the pieces of lattice to build up the rest of the porch.  I didn’t bother installing any posts going down as you can’t see them anyways.

I then painted the porch and installed all of the “gingerbread around the edges of the roof.  The roof was painted with Floquil’s roof brown and then covered with fine ballast to provide texture.  Using the ballast is a good way to cover the small cuts and adjustments that were needed on the roof.  Also in this picture you can see where I added the “spears into the gingerbread around the roof of the model.  I had to use putty around some of them to fill in the gaps, but it was easy to hide the patches.