Saturday, October 25, 2014

1950s tract house

This year has been particularly bad for starting projects and then setting them aside for 'later'. I'm hoping I can finish all of them off over the next few weeks - yes, famous last words :-) This is the easiest, so I figured I'd start with it.
I bought this little 1950s style house from George's Trains resale table back in the early summer. I think it was $5. 
It wasn't glued together that well, had some sinking as you can see in the photo, and some blobs of glue got slopped on the outside. 
Even though there were also big blobs of hardened glue on the inside, the corners still had gaps.So, I pried it apart as much as I could in order to glue things back together a little more squarer. Unfortunately, I broke a couple of wall corners in the process and had to do a little remedial work on the walls. So, after a general cleanup with with files and sanding sticks to smooth the outside walls, get rid of glue blobs and clear off the stubs from plastic frets, it glued back together reasonably well.
I added a wall between the garage and the main house so if I pose the garage door in the open position, it won't look too odd inside. Also, I glued some clear plastic windows in the frames. 
The walls were sprayed with Krylon flat white, and the doors and awnings were brush painted with some flat yellow acrylic paint. The chimney was brush painted with a suitable brick red, and a fine brush was used to dab on some white mortar lines. The roof shingles are a mix of grays and black.
An inside wall surface is embossed with 'Plastiville USA' - obviously indicating that it's from the Bachmann series by that name - and that it was patented on 'June, 17, 1952'. After this minor reno, it's not looking too bad after all those years.

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