There is a reason I almost never throw anything MR related away. Experience has taught me that within a week of throwing out something I have no use for, something will come up that it would be perfect for.
I am currently in the process of building a fairly large residential area on my layout that requires 16houses. I have been gathering suitable houses for several years but one of my pet peeves is that so many HO scale houses are deeper than they are wide while most of us have more width than depth to our layouts and in my case, the eliminated a lot of choices from consideration. I was resigned to recycling a couple cheap houses from my old layout although they would have to be dressed up quite a bit to meet my current standards. Then yesterday while looking through some storage boxes for something else, I found two house kits that were perfect not only for my space but also era and style. I had forgotten I even had them. One was Branchline’s Maxwell House kit and that was one I had decided I wanted to get, forgetting I already had it although after finding it, I did remember having bought it. The other one was a real find. It is a Patal kit and that is a real mystery. I have no idea how old it is, when I bought or even if I bought if for the current layout or the previous one. I don’t even remember the Patal name, whether they are even in business anymore or when they went out of business. For all I know this kit could be 20 or more years old and from the look of the box, it almost looks like it could be. All I know is that after buying this kit, I never got around to building it and must have just stored it away until the day came when I could put it to use. Luckily I found it at exactly the time I needed it. It was like finding a wad of cash. This will be just the latest of a number of structures on my layout that I’ve put to use for something other than what I initially got them for.