Hemlock Street Part 3 - More Houses | 2 Comments - Click Here :

Suzanne and her friend Janine enjoy a cool beverage on Suzanne's porch while they wait for their husbands to come home from the mines. These are HO figures on the porch of an HO house; the figures at the bottom of the image are S scale. What do you think?

    Keith Hayes - The Leadville image featured rows of shotgun houses, so called because you could stand at the front door with a shotgun and shoot it though the back door through each of the successive rooms. Leadville homes often were distinguished by a bay window. Though I found a number of kits that filled the bill, I still needed to make some homes to fill the gap. Shotgun houses tend to be much longer in life than the models available

    A Grandt kit filled the bill for one of the houses—No Problem Joe’s.  This house worked in the center of the scene. I still needed a house behind the grocery. Grandt also offers “grab bags,” packages of random architectural details which are great for projects like these: it is like a starter kit for your scrap box. I had a couple grab bags on hand, and got some styrene sheet out. I laid out the gable ends, found a nice front door and studied the windows to figure out which ones could be combined to make a bay window. The selected windows were glued together with styrene shapes at the corners, which doubled as bracing and trim: voila! a bay window.

    For another house, I went back to the N scale Grandt kits and glued two wall sides together to create a longer shotgun. The Reese Street kits also have some shed additions, and I used these to add to some of the other kits I built to add some variety to the rear of the houses that would face the room. I glued a couple together to create an outbuilding. The Reese Street kits also include some outhouses, and these were painted to match their houses.

    The houses feature a variety of roof covering. I used the cast wood shingles for a couple. Others had a rolled roof. I also got some Wild West shingles in several scales and colors and applied them following the directions. Oh, I did use a Sharpie to paint the roof edges and ridge black prior to applying the shingles.

    When I laid out the street in foam I also made the home lots. As I was contouring the foam, I placed the houses and carved the foundations. To provide some variety, some of the foundations are smooth to simulate concrete; for other buildings I carved in lines and painted the foam to look like stone.

Working like a developer, I cut the lot for each home out as an individual. Leadville lots were 15' x 105'. I shimmed the top to the right level, and cut the foam to match the outline of the house. Depending upon how much of the foundation would be visible, I also textured the foundation to simulate either stone or concrete. The 'wedge' shape of the street is clear here too.

All the foam lots have been glued together, painted and a layer of sand applied. Where the joints did not line up, I applied Matte Medium to smooth out the unruly joints and make final adjustments. This was followed by more tan latex paint and a gentle sprinkling of sand.

The houses are lined up behind Carleno's Grocery. The first two on the left are scratch built; the next two are Grandt models in HO and N respectively and the model to the right is an N or Z scale laser cut wood model of a shotgun house. You can see even from this angle the visual deception works.

I decided that the N scale Grandt kit was too short in plan, and glued two kits together to make a longer house. I added a Wild West Models corrugated roof. Suzanne's house (second from left) is getting a Wild West shingle roof. I used a wide tip Sharpie to blacken the roof edge before applying the shingles.

Keith Hayes

Modeling Leadville in Sn3