Shoe's 30 for 30, day 13: modularity attacks

Ok, we've done a few of these, now.  Let's build upon what we've learned.  I wanted to establish three things today.  First, let's build the floor on top of the jettying correctly.  This will necessarily raise the height of the second floor but I don't think that's a problem.  Second, let's standardize the floor sizes for at least some of the floors so they can be interchangeable.  Third, lets look into being able to modularize some standard parts so our standins work better.  While I really like building stuff, playability is important, too, and the best way to ensure a build is used as often as possible is to make it usable for multiple things.

Starting with the 2x3 tile size from the merchant house, the upper floor plan is 5 7/8 x 3 7/8 inches which is right about where it should be.  The last eighth of an inch in either direction is probably due to my sloppy measuring or a Proxxon set at too high a temperature.  The bottom floors are pretty hopeless and they don't need to be compatible with each other anyway, so we don't care about those.  So we're going to start building 2x3 buildings with the second floor at this size and this time around have a cartoonishly large jetty.  Other parts of the build are pretty much the same as always.  "Always" in this case being the roughly five weeks since I got my Proxxon and started making buildings. 

Remember how way back on day 3 I said that each piece of the building could be a standin except that some of them looked funny without doors?  Well, we can freakin' fix that, too.  I've been punching out the window and door holes with a hobby knife.  This has been getting easier as I learn how to work with the material better, and the walls keep getting thinner.  A new hobby knife blade didn't hurt either.  The cross stitch mesh windows don't usually even get glued in--they're held in by friction the same as most of my doors.  This got me thinkin'.  What if we made the doors and windows modular?

So here we go down the rabbit hole.  As long as the dimensions are correct there isn't going to be any issue popping doors and probably their immediate timbers out of a wall and replacing the whole thing with a different piece.  As an added bonus, we don't need to do this for every window/door combo; only the ones we might want to replace.  I've been varying the window size from 1"x1" to 0.75"x0.75" to 0.5"x0.5" to fit the building so we'll limit ourselves to the large windows in this scheme since it's also the width of the door.  All large windows have been framed at least on the left and right by timbers and those are already standard sizes.  Timbers above should stay right where they are. 

Overall this was all more complicated than I expected and required a lot of measuring.  The result is still good, though and didn't take too long.  Including milling, measuring, and shingles (still bullshit) we're at 6 hours.  It's starting to look like 4 or 5 hours is the limit for one of these two story jobs with this methodology.  Maybe next build we can look at trying to significantly reduce this.  Tomorrow:  painting.