Sunnyside Market ~ Friday, August 03, 2007

This Model Power farm house kit has been in production for a couple decades.



A few years back, I bought two of them, with a kitbash project in mind: instead of building two two-story houses, how about chopping up the walls and building four one-story ones, each a little bit different.

At the time I was thinking of building a mining-themed layout, and this seemed like a good way to get a "company town" look. Since then my interests have settled more definitely on traction, but no matter, plenty of neighborhoods with trolley lines running through them have rows of similar types of small, wood-frame houses, modified slightly over the years until they're no longer identical.

As it happens, few blocks from my house, there's an interesting garage with a roof-line reminiscent of a castle.



I decided I wanted to add one of these to one of my houses. This house evolved into a 1930's-ish general store/gas station, and here's the result.







Some construction notes:

• The front wall is built up from Evergreen styrene.
  
• The loading dock and front porch are built up from scale lumber, board-by-board--which wasn't as hard I as thought it might be.
  
• The foundation and chimney are basswood, with carved to look like random-stone masonry, the spray-painted with gray primer, and each stone brush painted with random dabs from Floquil Polly Scale weathering colors.
  
• The smokejack added to the chimney is a reject from my interurban caboose project (see you should never throw extra parts away--even the ones you make yourself!).
  
• The individual stones supporting corners of the wooden decks are blobs of wood-filling putty.
  
• The tar-paper roof is strips of regular printer paper (what we used to call "typing paper") colored black with a wide-tipped sharpie.
  
• The round "button" soda-pop signs (one Pepsi, one Dr. Nut) are circles of styrene, popped out of a sheet with a hole-punch.
  
• Signs and lettering are all dry-transfers.