Shoe's 30 for 30, day 15

Today we have a similar half timbered building to the last few, though only the first story, base, and top floor with attendant modular roof.  This time around I'm handling the timbers as texturing rather than building.  It sounds straightforward and it turned out to be. 

Texturing with a pen isn't super bad, it's just time consuming and a heck of a lot less fun.  The wall texture wouldn't have been so bad if I'd remembered to do it before things were glued.  Since I wasn't able to hide seams with faux timbers I made some precision cuts and glued with PVA instead of hot glue.  I don't like using PVA for this--it cures far too slowly but if you don't want an easily measurable gap at your seams, it's a better choice than hot glue. 

The top floor is pretty much the same construction as it was in the previous build.  It's a thin slab of XPS with some beams glued to it then stuck on top of the existing walls.  Texturing on the beams was done with a comb as per usual and they run the full width of the slab.  I'm liking this better than embellishing the supporting beams after the fact.  For some reason I made the door modular though I'm not sure why. 

As an added bonus, I experimented with a modular roof which could itself stand in as a rooftop.  It fits on the normal 3 7/8" x 5 7/8" textured floor base.  In retrospect I should have fired up the hot glue gun to slap together the roof instead of dealing with slow curing PVA.  As a result the construction is slightly wonky since I couldn't weight anything down.  I'm hoping it stiffens up with the mod podge coating whenever I get to painting it.

The base is probably slightly too large.  I'll probably shave a quarter of an inch off width and length next time up.  I also forgot to put a chimney on it...again.  I've got a pile of the right size blanks already textured, even. 

Overall this build wasn't super expensive.  Hated shingling included and not including dry times, it was a little over four hours.  Including a second story wouldn't have increased the cost significantly so I'm thinking this is a better choice for speed builds.  I'm a little surprised by that.  I would have expected the pen work to be a lot spendier.  I'm not sure how well that texturing for will work out but since I wasn't super ambitious today, I can 't show it painted. 

In other news, today marks the halfway point in this challenge.  I've painted 11 miniatures, built 5 pieces of scatter terrain, published 1 article, and built 6 buildings.  Quite a pile of stuff--storage is starting to be a problem.  Tomorrow will be something simple, probably.