Scratchbuilding a Frame House
Feature Article in Run 218 of
Probably more times than not, you find yourself wanting to place a building in a particular spot on the layout and none of the commercially available kits will fit your area. Either that or the kits are not the right look you are striving for. This is where scratchbuilding a structure is the solution. With a few basic building items and a little creative ingenuity you can build exactly what you want.
For this article I chose to build a house that has been in my wife’s family since its construction in the late 1930’s until recently, when it had to be sold. In this case, since a premade kit is out of the question, scratchbuilding is a perfect solution.
Before beginning, take a few reference photos, making sure to capture it from every angle. Also, it is important to take a few measurements of the actual structure to use as reference. Measurements of the size of windows and the distance between windows and doors are important to help maintain the scale of the final product. (Photo 1&2 are of the prototype.)
Next, a rough drawing of the project needs to be made. You do not need to be an artist, but the rough drawing of the building should show dimensions, placement and sizes of windows, doors etc. From this, it is easy to determine which doors and windows you can use for the building. From the rough drawing, draw out the design on a piece of 3/16” black foamboard (Photo 3.) Using a No.11 blade in your xacto knife, cut out the building walls. (Shown in Photo 4.)
Once the walls are cut out, if the building will be lighted, decide on which doors and windows will have light showing through them. Cut the openings for the lighted windows and doors out of the walls a little larger than the door/windows than you plan to use. (Photo 5 shows this step.) Using black foamboard works great for this project because any windows or doors that you choose not to have lit are already blacked out.
For this house there are a couple of windows that are not a standard stock windows. In this case, you need to use parts of stock items to create the pieces needed with extra strips styrene. In Photo 6, the top part of the photo shows how two stock windows are bridged to create the front window. The bottom part of the photo shows how the transom window from a door was used to create the small window by adding strips of styrene around it for a frame.
Next take the foamboard walls and place them down onto the backside of the structure siding and trace out the walls onto the siding. (Shown in photo 7) For this building, Midwest scribed clapboard siding was chosen.
Once the siding is cut out into the shape of the wall sections, mark the door and window positions onto the face of the siding. Place small pencil marks to help show the edges of the openings in the foamboard. Making the openings in the foamboard a little larger than the windows allows a little ”fudge factor” on window and door positions on the siding. Photo 8 shows the marks at the top of the siding. Photo 9 shows using doors and windows to trace the shape onto the siding. Center them with the marks at the top edge of the siding.
Finally, cut out all your doors and windows with your xacto knife.
After cutting out the doors and windows from the siding add either diffusion material (like tissue paper of opaque plastic) to the window openings or you can add photos in the openings to give a sense of a interior to your building. Glue these pieces into all openings in the foamboard. This step is shown in Photo 10. Photo 11 shows the foamboard with the window diffusion in, wall siding cut out and doors and windows test fit into the openings.
The next step is to assemble the foamboard wall shell with hot glue. (Shown in Photos 12 & 13). Now the building is starting to take shape. In photo 13 you can see some small strips added to the inner wall side and to the front upper wall bottom. These strips are there for support for when putting on the roof pieces which will be done later. (One important step to remember when laying your building walls out is to make sure to add the thickness of the foamboard to your siding length on the walls that have the foamboard glued to the end of them. Photo 14 shows how I added the 3/16” to the outside wall siding on my two side walls.)
Once the walls are glued together, then you need to make the base for the building. This building is going to be used on a Christmas layout and so it will be lit using a typical 5w bulb like you find in a Dept. 56 building. Using a piece of ¼” hardboard (Masonite), trace the interior wall pattern onto the hardboard shown in Photo 15. You can also see in photo 15 that the base is used for the outside steps.
Photo16 shows the bottom once it has been cutout from the pattern traced onto the hardboard. A jigsaw works well for this step. An inch and a quarter hole will also need to be cut into the middle of the base for the bulb. Once the base is test into the walls, it is then attached to the walls using hot glue from the inside.
Now is the time to paint all the doors and windows. First take a small drop of AC glue on a hobby stick (Popsicle stick) and glue parts to them. This makes for easy handling when painting. (Photo 17)
Prime the doors and windows using spray can gray primer. (This works to give a good surface for the craft paints to adhere) Next, airbrush the parts with craft paint diluted with water. (Photo18 shows this step.)
After doors and windows are dry paint the clapboard siding. Then glue the doors & windows into their openings in the clapboard siding. (Photo 19.) Yellow wood glue works well for this
Next step is to make the stairs. Again using pieces of hardboard, cut out pieces to form steps. In photo 20 you can see how using several pieces stacked together form the side entrance porch. Once satisfied with the fit, glue the pieces in place. (Hardboard is a good material to simulate concrete because you can distress it with your xacto blade to create chips and cracks if desired.)
This house has a stucco finish on the foundation walls. To simulate this a product called Texture Gel by Liquitex was used. (shown in Photo 21.) To achieve this finish, mask off the foundation area on the foamboard and then use an artist’s pallet knife trowel it onto the foamboard giving that stucco appearance. (Shown in photo 22 &23.) Once dry, paint with light gray craft paint for the final finish along with painting the steps.
The next task is to install the window glaze and window treatments in the windows. This project used clear office presentation sheets that were cut to fit over the backs of the door and windows. Masking tape was used to form window shades and either tissue paper or single ply napkins were cut into shape of curtains. Photo 24 & 25 show the back of the clapboard wall and the front as you would view the model.
Now it is time to glue on the clapboard onto the foamboard with hot glue. In this step you have to work quickly, so that your hot glue doesn’t set up before you place it on the building. Photo 26 shows the clapboard walls glued in place.
This prototype also gave some extra challenges. There were metal awnings that needed to be duplicated. Sheet styrene with a fine corrugated metal pattern seemed to be the best material for building the awnings. After determining the size that looked right as compared to the prototype, the styrene was cut into the pieces needed to form the awnings. Using a Chopper ll helps to speed up the cutting process of duplicate pieces. Photo 27 shows the pieces that make up an awning. Once everything is cut, glue all the pieces together with styrene cement and paint them, with the same steps as was done with the doors and windows earlier. Photo 28 shows the awnings glued in place.
To finish up the siding you need to add the corner boards. For this take square pieces of stripwood and cut them to length to fit your corners and proceed to glue them into the corner where the two sidewalls come together. Photo 29 illustrates this. After glue has dried, paint to match the siding.
Photo 30 shows how the side entrance awning over the back door was made. The left side of the photo shows a piece of ¾ plywood cut into a triangle along with a piece of clapboard to glue onto the face of the plywood. The right side of the photo shows the awning in place and covered in Grandt Line paper shingles.
To make the roof, use pieces of artist illustration or matte board. It can be a scrap. As you can see in Photo 31 this board was used near the airbrush at one time. Cut and hot glue these onto the wall tops and add strip wood along the ridge for extra support as shown in Photo 32
The front hip roof is made by scoring the two angles into the topside of the matte board and folding down to form the hip. (Photo 33) Photo 34 shows how pieces of matte board are added to the underside back edge of the roof to change the pitch of the roof. These pieces rest on that extra piece of foamboard that was added to the bottom of the top front wall early on. The notch in the center back of roof is for the chimney. Once all the roof pieces are hot glued in place, Use Grandt Line paper shingles or make your own out of manila file folders. Photo 35 shows how the shingles are glued to the matte board using yellow wood glue. Once all the shingling is done you can paint the shingles the color of your choice. For this house a light gray paint was used and then weathered by brushing on a mix of Poly Scale Grimy Black and water as a wash.
To make the chimney, two pieces of square styrene tube were used and covered with Plastruct brick pattern sheet styrene. One of the tubes was cut down the length to make it narrower and then glued together with the other tube to form the sub-base of the chimney. In Photo 36 the left side of the photo shows all of the pieces including the discarded piece of tubing. Cut the strips from the brick sheet and leave them a little wider than the base tube. When these pieces are glued to the tubing, take your xacto blade and run down the edge of the corners while the plastic is still soft from the cement. This will help blend the corner seam. You can also add a little more cement along the outside corners after using your xacto blade. This will help to smooth the corner even more. The right side of Photo35 shows the finished assembled chimney prior to painting and glued to the front of the house.
The front and side porch railings were made up of pieces of music wire (spring steel) and the railing spindles are pieces of wire from garbage bag twist ties. Everything is glued together with AC glue and then painted. (The railings were a little over the top, but this building needed them) Photo 37 shows a piece of matte board with reference lines drawn to help keep things straight while gluing.
Scratchbuilding projects like this one are fun to do and only take a few evenings to complete. By creating a scratch built structure for your layout you feel a great sense of accomplishment and have a building that no one else has. The last photos shown 38,39,40 & 41 are of the finished project. The final project is painted in the original color scheme of the house. A gift for my father-in-law, it will make a nice addition to his Christmas layout, bringing him happy memories of the house he grew up in.
