Shacking up

What De Lancy doesn’t currently have are any homes. Not everyone lived over the store or out on the range so I need some homes. Period photographs show that in frontier towns these were often little more than shacks. So I thought about it a bit and came to the conclusion that I could make shacks especially run down ramshackle ones!

The basic shape of the floor and sides is all one piece

I decided on card clad with coffee stirrers.  Foam would be good for adobe buildings but I wasn’t fully happy with the material when I made the De Lancy store model as the walls felt too thick.  Strangely the card and cladding technique felt much more robust than the foam method.  The recycled card used in a lot of pet food packaging is great for this as it is thicker than cereal box cardboard.  Fortunately we have a dog so there is usually plenty around awaiting recycling.

Sides clad and assembled, roof under way (but wonky)

The card is easy to cut and fold the tricky bit is drawing up the building plan, and even that isn’t really too hard.  Cutting the stirrers would be easier with a mini band saw but a sharp Stanley knife and a cutting mat works OK.  Corner cladding was more card with everything glued together with PVA wood glue.  to finish I gave a liberal coat of brown ink (I wanted a darker look than the timber of the bath house to suggest tarred or creosoted wood.  The flat roof is the card with a coat of Vallejo German Grey to look like tar paper.   A thinned red wash for door and window frames with a white ink wash to give a distressed look and voila it's done.

The finished article (with lurking bad guy)

The build didn't take too long all complete in probably 4-6 hours, not certain as I did it in short bursts between other stuff.   The next one will be easier now I have established the technique, I might try a shotgun house next, or even a dog run house, (honest those are real styles) or I may just make more shacks.