Lake Town in need of Spring Cleaning!

With the base planking glued down, it’s time to start going in and layering up some details. Here, I’ve started adding some support beams, thicker beam to differentiate the floors, and room for a window. All of this is done using coffee stirrers (which can easily be cut with scissors). It’s the kind of job that can be done in front of the TV and still feel like you’re achieving something.

As I mentioned in my last post, I’m using easy materials to help build out this Lake Town board. Cheap items and found items are my friends here. And if I can glue with PVA wood glue, that’s even better (I have an allergy to superglue).

Some materials:

That’s a few examples of easy to find or re-purposable items for scratch-building. There’ll be more as this project develops, so hopefully you’ll follow along as I discover what works well – and what doesn’t!

I’m using lots of easy materials for this project, so I can keep the tools quite simple. Here’s the essentials.

1. Cutting mat. This one’s seen better days – but essential for making accurate cuts and protecting your table
2. Steel rule. A good straight edge when cutting, and handy for measuring
3. Craft knife. Sharp blades that can be replaced. This one has different blades including chisel tip that can be slotted in.
4. Scribing tool. Basically a sharp spike. Great for adding texture into materials and making half-cuts when folding card.
5. Small scissors. These are nail scissors I use exclusively for crafts. The tiny size helps when cutting small details.

In addition to this, PVA Woodglue – neat and in a dilute mix, and superglue are also essential.

I carefully measured the height between floors on the Lake Town houses – 1.5 inches. Then I measured a Belvita box – 4.5 inches from base to start of the “roof”. Great! That means I can make a mixture of two-storey houses and taller three storey houses to increase the variety.

Here, I’ve marked off 1.5 inches and cut a box down, then marked another 1.5 inches so I can start glueing wooden coffee stirrers to demarcate the different styles of wooden planking I want. The plastic kits have upright planking on the ground floor and horizontal planking on the upper floor.

…apart from paint, texturing and finer details!

These are 2 built GW Lake Town houses. One has been glued to the platform base, the other is currently loose while I figure out how to arrange them.

Hopefully you can see even here how versatile the kits are. I’ve given one of them an en-suite dunny!

These have had resin chimneys from Grand Manner added as some extra detail. Even though Lake Town is meant to be built entirely from wood, I figure that some elements made from stone would be acceptable.

One of the advantages of being a hoarder (yes, there are some!) is that we develop an eye for spotting how things can be repurposed in different ways.

When I first saw these Belvita boxes, I just knew they would make perfect little houses for a future project. They even come with ready made pitched roofs!

These really are a perfect under frame for some fun scratch-builds. So I’ve saved half a dozen of them.

They are a little taller than the Lake Town house kit, as you can see here. But, I’ve got some ideas for that!

As mentioned in the project description, this project will make use of a range of methods to bring the buildings and terrain scape of Lake Town to life. A staple of this however, will be the official GW Lake Town house kit.

In my view, this is the best and most reasonably priced (in terms of bang-for-buck) kit GW currently make. Even better, get the multipack if you can – giving you 3 of the houses for just £70 (versus £30 individually).

Each house comes on 2 packed sprues.

The house itself features reversible gable ends so you can make different styles, and the kit includes a ton of extras:

• 1 rowing boat with separate oars
• 2 barrels
• 2 fish baskets
• 1 glass float
• 3 lanterns
• 1 hanging sign board
• 1 outhouse, including seat and door
• 1 loading hook
• 3 long walkways and 1 short walkway.

With a little extra effort and imagination, a whole range of variety can be created, and I’ll be aiming to show that through this project.

I currently have 7 of these houses, so am excited with the opportunities!

Sadly this project didn’t survive moving over to my new account, so I’m adding the posts I’d previously made. If you could hit the little recommendation and upvote buttons on them, that’d be awesome x

For a project like this, I think a mood board is a must. It’s really helpful to collect pictures that can be used as a reference and help guide the outcome.

I was surprised how hard it’s been to find decent Lake Town images, but here’s some I’ve collected.