I know I haven’t posted for ages but I haven’t been totally distracted by holidays and DIY. I’ve been having an awful time with my roofs. I decided to put in lights, more for atmosphere than to actually light the interior. I need to make them removable to replace the bulbs if they go and decided the easiest way was to put them on columns you could pull up when needed:
I put in floors for each level made from balsa and then stained with wood stain. I cut holes through each floor for the columns and bulbs. I also put in balsa shapes painted green to block the floors through and through views:
I did the second half of the building the same but also put in some prints of bookshelves as well to give a more office feel. The stain is getting near the bottom so is getting redder:
This is the bottom floor and does not have any holes:
Here’s what it looks like in the semi dark with only the left hand done:
I don’t want to glue the roofs down because I have lighting in and they just don’t fit! I must be totally missing something. Bob suggests adding a triangle of wood on top of the edge of one of the wall but then how does the roof sit on top of it? Basically, I put in triangle pieces of card in the inside of the apex of one of the roofs and couldn’t get it to sit properly. Eventually I had to rip it off the first piece of roof, rip out the cardboard triangles and hack it around alot and then put it back in place. The problem was that I couldn’t get the roof to sit on top of the walls.
To get it to bed down properly I decided I need to have something other than glue. I thought of velcro but wasn’t keen so thought of neodymium magnets. They’ve worked a treat and the magnets are the same depth as the roof cardboard so I just needed to drill some holes to sit the magnets on the building into:
I’ll spare you the pain of the last few weeks and show you how the roof looks now with half the trim on. The trim is a piece of 1/4″ by 1/32″ underneath the cardboard and scribed to look like board on the gable ends. You need to trim the cardboard back to this trim which surprisingly wasn’t that bad despite all my problems. The edge of the roof is trimmed by two layers of 1 by 4 and 1 by 6 sandwiched together and then painted grey. You also need to fill some of the roof to roof joins with little triangles of wood. The cupola and dormer are also in place. Unfortunately I smashed the right hand end window when I slipped with the knife trimming the cardboard earlier. You can’t see it here but I guess it adds to the run down air:
I need to check again but the roof came off no problem just before I put the final trim on.
