AN ONGOING NEWSLETTER December 2008


Gay Bath House
by Gisby

The Bath House started life as a slot-together die-cut wooden kit from a dollar store. It was a cruciform house with gabled roofs, and I really wanted to make something out of it.

I suspect there was some miscommunication involved in the design, as there are no doors on the building, but there are double-sized windows extending to the roof. (AKA The walls were designed upside-down)

The parts were laid out on two 8.5 x 11 in sheets of sort-of-warpy plywood.

Before I removed the peices from the sheet, I glued & filled all the locating slots and all the windows. When they were solid, I removed the pieces.

I then cut away the locating lugs, and cut doors and a window into the ends. I trimmed the front wall level with the side walls.

I cut the pieces to fill the roof gables and one gable roof, and glued & filled them into place. The gable end I trimmed to fit the front wall, and I cut two corners from the sheet as roof reinforcements. This left me with the parts below (in yellow).

When the filled sections were dry, I sanded all the pieces, and scribed boards into the roof sections.

Apparently I didn't sand the inside walls. I could have left some windows in the walls, but chose not to. (I didn't think of it)

Happy, my a**!!!! I'm outa here!

I made a floor and sidewalk from craft sticks, scored to look like narrower boards. This provides needed stiffening to the walls.

Rather than attempt to scribe boards into the heavily-filled walls, I used craft wood to add battens for "board-and-batten" construction

The window and doors were framed with craft wood, and doors were made from craft wood and hung as per "How To Make Doors"

The (removable) roof is made from the modified roof sections, with the reinforcements added to strengthen & locate the roof. I also added a peak from matchwood.

The building front has the modified gable roof section added as a false front (board detail at the back), and the original peaked section glued inside as a roof support. (An L-shaped corner from the sheet could be added as further support)

The hitching post is made from bamboo skewer, and the overhead sign from craft stick and matchwood.

The front sign was printed on my computer, and framed with craftwood. And 'GAY' meant happy or festive, so get your mind out of the gutter....

All in all, I'm not certain about this one.

There was some satisfaction about making something from the dollar-store kit, but I'm not certain that it was less effort than scratch-building.


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