Ever build a model of your own house for your layout?

I am super impressed at the GREAT modeling you guys did/are doing!!!  Thanks for sharing the awesome modeling pictures!

- walt

Jim, set the cursor at the bottom right of each picture and hit the enter key a couple of times. That will separate them.

Thanks for posting those wonderful builds.

I thought they were real houses!  wow  amazing.  unbelievable job. 

Chris

When I first saw this thread, my thought was that this was way too hard, I could never do this.  While that's probably true, I see that several of you could do it!!  Congratulations, very impressive!  I'm formerly a CBL operator and currently a trains in boxes and bench-building guy.

It's not as hard as it looks, especially if you have blueprints of your house.  Most prints are drawn 1/4" to the foot so most of your work is done for you.  Just transfer your wall dimensions onto whatever you are going to use for your walls and start cutting.  For the house I grew up in, I actually used foam core board and backed it up with 1/2" X 1/2" pieces of basswood on the inside on the top and bottom of the wall for strength.  I also used some scrap aluminum right angle pieces for corner braces to make sure my corners are straight.  I have lots of photos of the process.  I used basswood strips for the window frames.  I painted the entire structure with a thick artists media to simulate cinder block and then painted it with acrylics from A.C. Moore.

They're all beautiful!

I've created a measuring stick that I place in front of a building that I want to model. It's four feet long with white and black electrical tape at 1 foot intervals and the last at 6" interval. I put it up to the side of the building when I take the picture. I use a digital camera of course. I import the picture into Corel PhotoPaint and correct the vertical and horizontal perspective distortion. The I import the picture into CorelDraw as a JPG or Bitmap, set the scale to 1" = 48" and then put some horizontal guidelines that are 1 inch apart (4 scale feet). I then enlarge or shrink the imported drawing so the 0 and 4 ft marks on the measuring stick touch the two guidelines. I then know that the picture is now in O'scale.

From this point, I put the picture on its own layer and turn off the editing of that layer and I'm able to make my working drawing directly over the picture of the actual building. O'scale buildings are big so it may have to print out on multiple pieces of paper (or larger sheets if your printer can handle it.)

While there still could be some distortion, you can make some pretty accurate models. The old fashioned way to do this was take the measure of something known, the height of a door for example, and then determine the sizes of the rest of the building. My way eliminates the guesswork.

Here's a view of my old house in Pennsylvania that I'm going to model some day. You can see the measuring stick in this picture.

This is a model of my childhood home. Its constructed with Evergreen clapboard siding and Grandt Line windows.

Wow. Spectacular. It'sperfect, Richard E. You have more than a model there, though; there is a happy, peaceful atmosphere one can feel, IMHO. And I love the neatly cropped hedge, just like we had along our home, too, way-back-when.

Frank M.

Thanks REV for the kind words. I missed this thread, so a bit late but here is the model I did of my house.

Here is the model

Here is a photo with the scenery done around it.

Here is a link of the how to on my webpage

http://home.roadrunner.com/~st...zphoto/Ourhouse.html

This is the model of our house that I built last winter.

I really like this! And it inspires me to make sure that I do one of our previous home, and maybe this one. The roof line on the former was much simpler than this one has. Now all you have to do is say "Betelgeuse" three times and see what happens. Could be fun...

My grandfather's old house, the color has changed but you get the idea

I plan to do so on my current O-gauge layout.  Up through 2005 my N gauge layout had an entire scratchbuilt subdivision of every home my grandparents had had, the various houses the various houses I lived in growing up, the four houses I have owned, and each of the houses owned by my sons.  Interestingly, I had a Faller car system garbage truck that would run and stop up and down the steets and a school bus that would drive through it, too.

The house I currently live in nowis the one nearest the lower left corner below

My dad ran a research drilling rig for Amoco in the '50s and '60s so we moved around the western US alot, living in fourteen houses in thirty years.  I modeled them all, many of the earlier ones below.  I never lived in one, but the Trailer Park on the right, but is the favorite thing I have ever built for a train layout in any scale.

Our modular club has a model of Henning's Trains, they're the sponsors of the club.  That's close, right?

Evrery bit of that is beautiful and a wonderful idea. I salute you for your creativity, prodigeous skills, and well honored memories, Lee!

FrankM.

I built a model of my house about 10 years ago. It sits in the living room on an old Singer sewing machine.

Alan Graziano