How many of us have scratchbuild a building for our layouts completely from the scrap box or parts we have had onhand? (In other words no trips to the LHS or the IHS to complete it.)
For me it started with a sprue of pieces that was hanging around the layout room. (I made myself a promise that I would come up with something to do with those parts. I finally came up with that idea last week.) I don’t remember what kit it came from (I think it came from one of Walthers lumber series kits.) However, those pieces and some styrene (.020" plain styrene [I don’t remember what project that was for], some freight car siding [left over from a woodchip car floor], some styrene strip for bracing [body mounting a coupler on an engine shell], and some standing seam metal roof [from a propane shed building roof for a printing plant]) have turned into a 3.25" W by 4.7" D x 4.125" H outdoor ampitheater.
Actually I have one building, that came with my recent Heljan wash shop kit that was supposed to go inside of it. I think I may finish it and use it as a Paint shed or Oil shed… something like that.
Well, I built the building in the background from a pair of Walthers kits and some sheet styrene which I had on hand…
…which doesn’t actually fit your criteria. However, I used the leftovers, plus some more sheet styrene to build this:
When that was done, I still had a lot of windows left - the Walthers kits both came with two complete sets. I also had a lot of sheet styrene left, too (I buy it in 4’x8’ sheets), so I decided to build a station:
Unless the scratchbuild/kitbash requires something out-of-the-ordinary, I usually have enough material in my scrap boxes, plus on-hand supplies (Grandt Line and Tichy doors and windows, Evergreen styrene of all types - more than most stores I’ve visited - plus detail parts, paint, etc., etc., to build just about anything I need. I also have quite a few structure kits still to be built - most on the layout are modified kits or scratchbuilt. [swg]
I no longer have it, but years ago I made a nice wooden shed out of a cereal box. The unfinished side of the boxboard was a nice grayish brown. I used a draftsman’s triangle and a straight edge to scribe parallel lines into it to simulate the boards. I created knot holes using the tip of a mechanical pencil. I stained it using some old wood stain I had in the workshop. You’d never know it wasn’t made from actual wood (I suppose in a way it was.)
When I was working on the Central St area on my layout, I needed a large background structure to hide the track that goes to the next scene and fill the space behind the foreground structures. I cobbled this together from spares and leftovers. It represents the back of 4-1/2 buildings, a street, and an additinal 4 buildings in the back that front on the street. This is how it looked as it was nearing completion with some painting, windows and details to be done
This is it installed with some completed buildings and a couple more added with Photoshop.
It’s rare, but I’ve built a few small structures from leftover parts.
Far more common is the fact it’s rare for me to build a kit unaltered and that usually sends me to the parts bin. And it’s rare to not have leftover parts or things set intentionally aside for use elsewhere. Mix and match is what helps things not look too much like you’ve seen it all already in the catalog.
The small white building in the foreground is a 3-sided truck shed. The walls are Evergreen clapboard, left over from another scratchbuild, and the roof is just sheet styrene. Doors and windows are Tichy parts, as I recall.
In the upper left corner of this picture, there’s a small white office building for the scrapyard. It’s pretty much the same components.
N scale logging “theme restaurant” from non-scale Frontier Log cabin found for 10 cents at a garage sale and saved to do “something” with. Windows from scrapbox, metal roof from pieces of thin brass sheet, smokejacks from parts left over from HO days, kitchen in back from leftover walls from house kitbash. One turbine vent left from an old kit and two vents from some kind of fat nails.
