Banking upon Success

From this to....(see end of post)

Yes you guessed it De Lancy now has a financial centre. A branch of The Freedman's Saving Bank to be exact. The bank actually existed for a few short years after the American Civil War but not perhaps in the South West where I am placing this one. The bank was set up to provide support to freed slaves, hence 'Freedman's' but by the early 1870s had gone bust. Given that banks were often named for their founders I thought I could use this as a bank founded by a Mr Freedman or as the actual Freedman's Saving Bank. That latter would make it an obvious target in the immediate aftermath of the war too.

The basic box frame with a start on the planking

And a start on the front façade with match stick framing

Just like the original wooden buildings I cut and applied planks to a frame.  However, in this case the frame wasn't timber scaffolding, it was a dog food box!  The build is mostly recycled cardboard also from dog food boxes.  I found that the recycling process used to make the card packaging creates a sturdy cardboard with a nice mid brown finish on the unprinted inner surfaces.  The packaging around tins of food is single ply while that around sachets is a thin corrugated card and both are great to work with.  They take paint and inks well and with a bit of stiffening from coffee stirrers hold their shape.  Best of all when given a layer of planking glued on with PVA wood adhesive they are fairly robust.

The planking effect is a bit rough and ready but I can live with that

The build wasn't particularly difficult.  I used the dog food sachet box as the frame as it had a 9.5 x 19cm footprint which fits well with other buildings.  I cut this down to the height I wanted (the original box would be great for a two storey building if you don't need access to both floors).   Planks were cut 5mm x 56mm from the single ply card .  I cut the doors and windows out and deconstructed the box for the frame so I could turn it 'inside out' as I wanted to hide the printed side under the planks and leave the brown as the inner walls.  I have settled on 20mm wide by 35mm high door spaces with a frame around the edge of the gap.  Matchsticks provided those door and window frames.  These I glued to the frame before planking.  A useful trick is to use multiples of the plank widths as the height from ground level to the window base to make planking easier.  Same at the top between the top of the frame and the roof line, not forgetting to allow for the size of the matchstick frame work around the cut outs.  once all the planks are glued in place edges can be tidied up using kitchen scissors and if you want a nice look glue an L profile edging strip around the corners to hide any ragged edges.  I didn't bother doing that for this build.  

Base added and side walk planked

To finish off I added a card board base under the building ensuring it extended 40mm beyond the building frontage to create a base for a side walk. I used some 5mm square section pine moulding rods from B&Q to lift the building and side walk off the playing surface.  I planked the sidewalk in the same way as I did the building sides.  Inside to help the card stay in shape a used more of the pine moulding as a rafter across the building to prevent the tops of the walls curving outwards and I added a counter, internal walls and a strong room.

Painting was acrylics on the frontage and staining to the other three walls using good old Agrax Earthshade on the side walk and a wash of highly diluted Vallejo Bone white  paint on the other outside walls followed by a light wash of Earthshade.

I can’t help but wonder how long it will be before someone either robs it or burns it down or both!

....to this a building with a decent Pedigree, chum