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Imperial Style House

This project was short and sweet (minus a few steps) and is one that I think will be very easy to replicate.


This build is based off of an already constructed product, and mostly requires paint, texture, and a few interesting details. Ive done something similar to this before, but I wanted to give it another try, and I will probably do it again in the future, as it is so easy to do. I started by going to my local craft store and picking up a super cheap wooden bird house. They usually have a huge selection of these, like maybe 30 or 40 options. Most of them don't look great, or are at the wrong scale, but there are always one or two that are perfect. They seem to rotate through stock pretty often as well, so I don't normally see the same constructions more than once or twice.

I'm a fool and I forgot to take any pictures of the house before I started modding it. I added a pieces of wood over doors and windows, as well as a few small plastic bits to give it some personality, but the main work that I did was the shingling. I used sheets of craft foam (which I have talked about in another post) which are flexible and sticky. I also happened to have a sheet that was orange, which is close to the colour of clay shingles. Because this foam absorbs so much paint, its nice to have something underneath that is close to the colour that I actually want. Shingling is a bit of a time consuming process, but it pretty easy. The only caveat to this, is that I actually used to be a roofer, so I know how different angles come together on a roof smoothly. It may be easier to start by shingling a simple A-frame (2 flat surfaces).



These X's are made from the same sticky foam as the shingles. They were the other relatively painstaking part of this project, and I made a few mistakes with them too. One thing I wish I had done, was to texture and stress them to look more like wood, but I think the paint job captures this well enough. You can also see from this picture how I painted the shingles in various shades of orange and brown to imply weathering, as well as the trail of moss in the valley.


Here is a closer look at a few of the details and the final product.






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