Building buildings - part 1

An order from Warbases showed up today - their VBCW Street pack, which contains 6 buildings, all neatly bagged in multiple ziplock bags. There's a church, a post office, a general store, a pub, a terraced house and a ruined house, all very English-looking.

I thought I'd make a start on the general store tonight. It comes in a ziplock bag with several more inside, for sets of bits that are common to multiple buildings, i.e. the windows, the back yard, the chimney. The corners of the various box-like structures interlock in the usual 'MDF-building' way, namely a finger joint, and there's a baseplate to keep it all square: a minor downside is that there's nothing to hold the baseplate square, so you do need to do a little holding with multiple fingers to get things squared up...

[As I write this, I'm kicking myself as I have a number of clamps out in the workshop to do exactly this: I'll go dig them out when I assemble the next one. :D]

One other minor gripe is that the windows are opaque - just flat pieces of MDF with the framing laser-cut into them: they're easy enough to paint, though, and with the lack of interior detail (compared to say the 4ground buildings) it's not that much of an issue.

I've got the walls of the main building assembled but not painted or joined together: I'm intending to do some detail painting while I can still lay things flat. before I assemble the building. At that point I'll probably decide whether to leave the roof removable and put an intermediate floor in: if I do, I'll need to magic up some floor supports, I think: IIRC I have some small square section balsa that should do the trick; if not, I'm sure B&Q can provide me some square section beading.

More tomorrow!