store room and a spot of gardening

[astudyinscarlet]

Recently I've been giving my model barn a makeover (that's not finished yet) and I had some small scraps of stone paper left from that and I thought 'what can I use those for?' because even though they were only very small pieces I didn't want to waste them. I decided to make a store room for yard bits and pieces to (probably) go next to the barn. This was being made on a budget of pretty much nothing using only what I'd already got, which meant it had to be made from a cardboard box.

At the still very box-like stage with the walls lined inside with additional cardboard pieces:

storeroom (1) by A Study in Scarlet, on Flickr

storeroom (2) by A Study in Scarlet, on Flickr

After cutting the door hole (the door was reclaimed from an old building that got, uh, 'demolished')

storeroom (3) by A Study in Scarlet, on Flickr

Window hole cut, raw edges of the cardboard sealed with electrical tape (superglued on cos otherwise it just does not stay put longterm) and then I started cladding parts of the outside with wooden boards (AKA lolly sticks) and added lolly sticks/drinks stirrers to the inside too and a scrap of wooden trim for a window sill.

storeroom (8) by A Study in Scarlet, on Flickr

storeroom (9) by A Study in Scarlet, on Flickr

Cladding and inside painted white, revamped door with new sign added, window 'glass' (plastic saved from a Breyer box) added and scraps of stone paper added to the lower parts with black wooden (drinks stirrer) trim added to conceal the joins in the paper and just make it neater anyway (this pic is blurry, sorry. The store room sign is actually legible in reality)

storeroom (13) by A Study in Scarlet, on Flickr

storeroom (14) by A Study in Scarlet, on Flickr

Back with painted wooden stirrer cladding and the final scraps of stone paper I had left on the bottom. Also you can see the hook rail I made (from, surprisingly enough, a dolls house hook rail, only all the original hooks on it had snapped off) for the back of the door.

storeroom (17) by A Study in Scarlet, on Flickr

Starting to construct the roof using another piece of cardboard. Like the main building I used electrical tape to seal the edges before I started to add 'tiles'

storeroom (18) by A Study in Scarlet, on Flickr

Roof tiles added (made from the approximately sixty billion offcuts of lolly sticks I had left from other projects). I don't even want to think about how many hours of tedious cutting and sticking this involved.

storeroom (20) by A Study in Scarlet, on Flickr

Tiles painted to a sort of slate colour (which looks weirdly metallic in this photo for some reason but is not at all metallic really). Also I added a gutter to the front which I made from dampened cardboard curved around a piece of dowelling and then covered in black electrical tape basically smeared all over in superglue for a rougher texture and then painted. The downpipe connected to it is a black drinking straw. I will probably weather the tiles more and add some moss or lichen or something but I'm leaving it for now cos I need to redo the barn roof so if I do weather the tiles I'll probably do both roofs at the same time so they look (hopefully) similar. (Yes I know the top edge is wonky but that's the trouble with having to use cardboard boxes and stuff like that, things never do end up straight cos boxes get warped too much. Although these aren't meant to be pristine square neat new buildings anyway, I imagine they're mostly old farm buildings just updated a bit)

storeroom (21) by A Study in Scarlet, on Flickr

Inside as it currently is with flooring added (that's actually roofing tile paper but I've got none of the flagstones paper I'd have liked to use), a couple of hook rails, shelf under the window, dolls house shelf (reclaimed from something else I did in the past and no longer have; it was mahogany but I painted it black) and the white shelf unit which I'm not sure if it's actually staying in there or not is made from half of a small mache box trimmed down and with cardboard shelves added inside, and I've added a few bits and bobs to it so far.

storeroom (22) by A Study in Scarlet, on Flickr

storeroom (23) by A Study in Scarlet, on Flickr

I'm probably going to add this to a base and put some plants and stuff around it so it's not quite finished yet. I have just potted up some Julip-sized plants today so these might be incorporated into that.
The rectangular planters were pieces off some toy horse (Pony World, I think) jumps, I think they were supposed to have flags in them but if they did the flags were broken off and so I kept these pieces because I thought 'hey those kind of look like planters'. The other pots are china thimbles. I painted them all with acrylics with a top coat of metallic turquoise nail varnish. The 'soil' was still drying here, hopefully it will look less sludgy when it's actually dry (I have no brown plasticine and no dolls house soil so I had to set the plants in grey plasticine covered in PVA glue sprinkled with green scatter stuff and then coloured that brown with dilute acrylics). The 2 left plants I bought a while ago which is why they're so much nicer than the rest.
The second from the right was part of a plant I got in some dolls house lot years ago. The other two spikier plants I made from green twine coated in PVA.

plants by A Study in Scarlet, on Flickr

Now I need to find some cardboard to make a base for the store room and figure out what exactly I am going to put around it.

[pinkmouse]

Wow, that's incredible Laura, fantastic work!! 😮

[pennylanestables]

Wow!! It looks wonderful. All of the little details are really impressive!

[cookie]

Looks awesome!

[juliporiginals]

That's absolutely brilliant, I love how you've made the roof and drain pipe, really clever

[Jan]

Love this! Great to see so many progress photos and those plant pots are just fab!

[Wollepluis]

Ahhh, it looks so pretty! Very well done!

[helen1983]

This is fantastic! I love the wooden cladding.

[astudyinscarlet]

I've made a few additions to this. It's now gained a base, drainpipe bracket and a horse shoe on the door, and a fish pond!
 
fish pond (2) by A Study in Scarlet, on Flickr

I bought the fish as though I have made some myself they're too big for this particular project and I can't make any that tiny. The 'gravel' was green scatter stuff mixed with acrylic paint and tacky glue with a tiny sprinkling of very fine gravel on the top and some rocks (pebbles stolen out of the gravel in the garden) and a piece of plastic plant set into it. The lily pads and plant on the surface are off a couple of really cheap plastic aquarium plants, with the stems cut down to stumps with are poked through holes in the plastic. The pond itself is half of a mache box with a card backing glued on for the water feature tube and an internal narrow ledge added near the top made of matchsticks, all painted black then with a piece of clear plastic stuck on top of the ledge. I then coated the plastic in gloss mod podge. The fountain is a piece cut off a narrow curved silver metal tube (it came off a beaded bracelet hence why it was curved) with rolled up tinfoil stuck into it and the other end set into a hole in the plastic and the tinfoil was also coated in mod podge. I stippled the mod podge around where the 'water' pours into it to make it more bubbly-looking. 
This was the third attempt at creating the 'water' by the way, the first time I tried this technique to make a pond it worked perfectly but this time the superglue and mod podge playing up presumably because of the ridiculous temperatures and humidity messed up the first two attempts so that was incredibly irritating and a total waste of time and resources. 

fish pond (3) by A Study in Scarlet, on Flickr

Hello fishies!

fish pond (1) by A Study in Scarlet, on Flickr


(The stone wall to the left of the store room is the barn. The thing to the left of the pond is a WIP piece which will hopefully end up as a water butt/plant holder/place to conceal the battery pack for the barn lighting)

[EG]

I was sure I'd commented on this earlier but that fish pond is fantastic! (or should that be fintastic? ...I'll get me coat)

[Wollepluis]

Oh my, that fish pond is soooo cool!