AWI buildings; From Bare Wood to...

Steve Eylül 30, 2022

Hello all; I've cobbled together my 28mm AWI buildings from Sarissa. In this post I'll show what I did and pretend that I knew what I was doing and ya'll can nod your head and play along...

Let's begin, it'll be fun.

MDF Buildings need Love Too. A Lot of Love it Turns Out

Alternative title: Set expectations to 'presentable.'

I'm still procrastinating starting the lead pile of American AWI infantry so I tackled some more terrain.

After all, I didn't buy these Sarissa North American houses for nothin.

As I was putting these together I was struck by how very plain the MDF kits were; really just basic wood shells with very minor details. The kits are fine in themselves, went together smoothly and are solid enough to withstand clumsy wargamer hands. In these initial phases I kinda regretted not getting buildings from 4ground. 4ground buildings once built are done and ready to go (the only negative is that each one looks like every other 4ground building) and these Sarissa buildings once done still require effort to make them look pretty.

It's like the difference between men and women; men get out of the shower and are ready to go and women have another 45mins of hair and make up. Unless you're into man-scaping, I don't judge, I had a metrosexual phase too.

So these buildings will need a little love before hitting the table; problem is that after loving Wife #1, The Kids, Select Members of my extended family, and strangers on the internet, I don't have a lot of love left to give... in other words I wanted them to look decent but not put in too much effort. Let's see if I was able to thread the needle between being lazy and getting some presentable results.

As a refresher, the buildings started out looking like this:

"Please love me" they say.

"Come Closer"

Were You Born in a Barn?

One time saving / lazy technique I tried was simply to spray paint the buildings the color that I wanted them, versus priming them white or black and spending a lot of time painting them. This worked OK. I learned that if you spray from far away the etched details (like seams in boards) are maintained.

I also learned that you have to seal the spray paint with a varnish before you paint over it. Otherwise the spray paint just sorta repels the hobby paint and it takes several coats. There probably some cool science-y explanation for this.

The Barn was spray painted red, and the windows and doors picked out in white.
I thought this looked suitably Barn-ish. Aren't all barns red?

But I was bothered by how bare the inside appeared.
It just looks unfinished and like it's missing something.

It's the floor that is then most jarring and needs help. What goes inside a barn? Obviously hay and straw. But I've never been in a real barn so what do I know?

I found THIS helpful post from Pat over at the blog of Wargaming with a Silver Whistle, well known for his terrain, on how to make hay stacks from door mats. Thought I would give it go..

Take a door mat and cut it into small strips.
I have lots of this door mat material lying around from my FoW days.
It's ubiquitous for fields in 15mm.

Then using my manly strong hands I cut the material off the strips.
Slightly messy, but getting a pile of straw / hay raw materials.

Covering the floor of the barn with white glue, I suddenly thought:
"Wait! Maybe I ought to try this out with a spare base of something...eehh, too late now.
Fortune favors the bold and all that."

The "straw / hay" was then push into the glue along the floor and let dry.
When does straw become hay anyway?

After it was dry, I dry brushed it with a dark yellow and then a bright yellow.
Overall, came out looking pretty good. A big improvement over the bare floor anyway.

Some troops in the Barn

And now for the roof. Again, being lazy and not wanting to be crazy like Lazgun over on his blog making his own shingles (and buildings), I simply bought some premade ones. I was alerted to the existence of these from hanging out on the TMP forum.

These were very handy and easy to use.
Just glue them onto the roof in overlapping strips.

Completed Barn viewed from the outside.

Our House, is a Very Very Very Fine House

I have 4 of these Sarissa houses that all basically the same. I don't know if that will be a good or bad thing once they're on the table because maybe it'll be too uniform. But it's what I bought so it's what I got. Maybe they all just belong to the same HOA. (I don't like it when my house has an HOA, but I love it when your house does!)

During the process of building the houses I took pics at different times because I was not organized and was kinda finding my way, completing a step on one house influencing how I did the next...

First up I spray painted the houses like the barn, using off whites or whatever color and then sealed them with varnish. When dry I painted the window and door frames and what not..

Work in progress shots, you get the idea.
Paint up the outside as you see fit.

Some of the houses had a stone pattern along the foundation and all the chimneys have stone etched detail, which I did NOT feel like painting. Instead, I remembered this tip from The Tactical Painter (who is MUCH better at prettying up these Sarissa kits) of using embossed paper with a stone or brick pattern.

I picked this up from the same online store that I got the roof shingles.

It's a simple matter of cutting the paper to shape, and gluing it onto the model where you want it.

Instant foundation and chimney.
You can see another house in the background

BUT WAIT A SECOND! Are those bricks in the chimney going vertical instead of horizontal? What a silly mistake. I'm sure no one will notice even though I just noticed and I'm sure I only did that once...

GAAAAH! Both of these. I'm gonna have to fix it because it'll bug me.

That's better. Actually looks more like a chimney.

The inside floors of the houses have some lines denoting floor boards so that is alright; enough detail for me. Just paint it brown. Everyone in the AWI has hardwood floors. Which just leaves the inside walls and chimney looking a little out of place.

Bricks can go in for the inside chimney, and I had the idea of using dollhouse wallpaper for the insides of the house. These aren't log cabins after all, so a little finery is not out of place. At first I was thinking of purchasing some in the appropriate scale, but then I found some printable designs on the wonderful internet. Yes, wallpaper existed back then, it's called the Federal Era. Extra knowledge exploding all over your brain.

I printed the patterns on cardstock (I raided my wife's supply like a thief in the night) and just cut and glued it into place. I used the parts of my 4th house kit as a template. At first I tried to make it one sheet of paper per wall with the doors and windows cut out precisely but this turned out the be hard to do, and started to feel like effort, so in the end I just guess-ta-mated and just glued cut out strips around the windows.

So far so good.
Wait! Are those chimney bricks VERTICAL again?
AND I forgot to leave a hole for the fire place.
What an Idiot I am.

Completed interior.
I think I'll leave the chinmey as is because I'm starting to get a bad case of the
"its-close-enough-itis."
Besides, don't I have infantry to be painting?

(I actually didn't steal any card stock, I told my wife I was gonna print out wallpaper and was told "That's the cutest thing I've heard."

I think this one came out better.
"Shoot out the windows guys!"

The roofs of the houses were done using the same premade shingles.

Success? From Bare Wood to...Presentable

Largely a success. While I was saying in the beginning of the post (you did read the text of the post right? not just skim through and look at the pictures? I never do that..) that I had some buyers remorse with the Sarissa kits because of the extra effort. However, now that they're done and each is a little unique building I like them a WHOLE lot better. Each looks pretty good from the outside, and on those occasions when troops enter a building there's a little something extra inside to keep up the illusion. There's something of a rabbit hole on how many details you can start to model, but on the whole I did what I wanted; the wargamer standard. One thing I wanted to do was add some window sills and such to the insides but I seem to be out of balsa wood. Though I didn't have any and it seemed like a small thing to go out and go shopping for during PANDEMIC...so that will have to wait.

Mind Games (and Final Presentation)

Because what I want in my terrain is that momentary trick of the brain; where we see the terrain items and not the material it's made from. Our brains all know that these things are not the real thing, but it's more fun when our brains tell us "that is a house...made of paper" versus "that is paper..shaped like a house." This momentary illusion is helped by having more stuff that around that set's the scene.