Buildings for the "Old West" --

For some reason I keep getting sidetracked away from my intention to write about my Seven Years War project.

Well, today I came across some photos I took of some "old west" building I built about a year ago.

Picture #1 shows the four in a row. They are all slightly different shapes and heights; and no two are alike (although two are pretty similar).

Picture #2 should give you an idea of how I constructed them.

First, I built the four walls of foamcore. I then glued thin sheet balsa to the four sides.

Then I traced and cut out a cardstock "base" for not only the building, but with a rear walkway to an outhouse and a front walkway.

I used an old dull pencil to scribe the psuedo-board shapes into the balsa.

The roofs were made of two pieces of cardstock held together with masking tape. This was then covered with "shingles". These were made while watching TV as I simply cut strips from cereal boxes and then clippped them into odd shapes.

As you can see from picture #3, I added strips of balsa trim around doors and on top of the "false fronts".

You can also see that I used strips of clipped-off "craft toothpicks" to create the walkways.

Pictures #4 and #5 show some two storey buildings. The first is a "hotel" with balcony; and the second, a corner saloon with a walkway around it.

All of these buildings were surprisingly simple to make. A little time-consuming, but really rather easy.

One piece of advice though -- pre-planning is vital. For example, while the buildings are of differing sizes, I made sure that the fronts and sides were such that I could use standard sizes of balsa to clad them.

Oh, and if you ever wondered why so many "old west" buildings had those "false fronts" . . . it was because frequently all that was behind them was a big tent (and not a building at all).

Also, keep in mind that much of the "old west" was actually on the prairies where wood was in short supply.

Hopefully my next post will get back to the real focus of this blog -- the principality of Saxe-Bearstein and the Tricorn Battles of the "Wars for Arcadian Glory".


-- Jeff