Spent this weekend pimping up some MDF buildings from Sarissa precision (more here) to fit into my Swedish 1943 project, that I have been working on slowly over the last few years – exploring a what-if invasion by Germany in 1943 through Norway. It is a passion project and I have enough buildings to create a few farms but wanted to add some more.

This is the village so far

These were the houses I bought this time around.

As I have explained before I want to create a certain look to make the building fit into the environment so a Normandy type building will not really do. In Sweden most house at this time, and still are in Dalarna, are made of wood and painted either Red or Brown (most commonly red). I have opted to go hard on the red with white details as a unifying and most common look.

The first two buildings were the stable and the barn and the first step on these was to plank them and add tiles/roof, I did this using thick paper/card. This is just to create a little bit of structure to allow a plank pattern to show throgh as opposed to a flatish MDF surface. Note that I plank vertical.

This leaves them looking like this.

I painted them in Hull red and then another layer of red mixed with hull red (vallejo paint) added some white detail and quick weathering. They really look the deal, if I can say so myself.

Next up the two houses

First the “Dunkers Church”, with some detail being added after planking and coffee stirer detailing, including a bird house (My great Grandad apparently had a bird house on the back of this house that he was very fond of)….

Some planters outside the windows (these will be filled with plants later).

The house will need some roof tiling – I am waiting for some from Sarissa, so it will be painted next time.

As for the Dutch House (done in the same way as the others), I wanted to use this one to illustrated how you can make tiling a roof a little bit quicker than adding tile by tile, as I used to do. You can of course get tiling cardboard from Sarissa for about £4.5 per roof as was used for one of the barns as shown before. Anyway here is how I do it, you need cardboard (like a cereal pack), a sharp knife/scissors, ruler (metal works best), masking tape and a little bit of time.

First take a piece of cardboard and mark up the width of the tile you require, I used 5mm for 15mm (this is actually a 0.5 meter tile in scale but it kind of works you might want to go finer)

Cut out strips with hobby knife or scissors

Put the strips together between two strips of masking tape, leaving a very small gap between the tiles.

Use scissors or a sharp hobby knife with a ruler firmly pressed against the sheet and cut strips the other way to create strips like this (a row of tiles being held together by the masking tape, as shown below).

Now use this to clad your house (use Superglue due to the masking tape not being that PVA compatiable), start from the bottom and pretest each level before you glue it. DID I SAY USE SUPER GLUE. Have good ventilation with the glue.

It will look funny depending of what cardboard you are using but it gets all painted over in the end so it is totally irrelevant. This is how the roof looks like when finished – you could make your tiles tighter and also cut more precise than I did but the point is that the masking tape allows you to do this really quick as you add strip by strip instead of brick (I mean tile) by brick.

Next time we will paint the two houses, after I added some of Sarissa tiles on the other one.

Not really 1943, more like 1973, Dad on the left with his mates playing badminton on a nice sunny day. Note the houses in the background, that is Dalarna folks.

/ Hope that was of some interest.