A couple of years ago, I ran into some inexpensive HO Smalltown USA building kits at a train show. Since I needed to populate my metropolis, I bought five of them with the intention of putting them together to make one “Merchants’ Row.”
I didn’t want all of the buildings’ fronts lined up in a row, so on two kits, I cut about 3/4" of an inch off of the building sidewalls at the back. I then assembled them as intended, cutting the roofs to fit. One note here… the tops and bottoms of the Smalltown USA building fronts are completely interchangeable. I didn’t realize this or I would have mixed things up a little more.
For something different, I printed some strips of paper with black on the bottom and a few different colors on the tops. These I laminated, then cut apart to make window glass & shade inserts for the windows upstairs and on the back of the buildings. For the storefronts, I did a similar thing using some different colors that I thought would look good with the storefront framing. It turned out a lot easier to do than I thought it would.
This approach seems to have an unlimited number of possibilities as you could put door numbers, business names, Venetian blinds, merchandise… even people in the windows if you wanted to.
The final step was to paint the details on the building fronts. I don’t have a very steady hand for this kind of stuff but the details were raised enough to make painting them bearable. I then glued the buildings together with some .20 inch plastic strips between them as spacers. I