"Old West building interiors?" Topic

I'm going to be building some scratch built buildings. I can find plenty of source pics for exteriors, but what about interiors? I kind of doubt there were too many old west buildings with plaster walls like I see in old buildings here on the east coast. Would use wallpaper or anything like that, or would that be more found in bigger cities? Would it have mostly just been vertical or horizontal planks and that's pretty much it? Aside from the furniture and things like that, what did the interior of an old west building look like? Was it just a typical wood frame like you'd see today, and just boards nailed in on both sides?

Just curious, I want to put together something that will look nice on both sides of the wall :)

The answer is; it depends. Wallpaper was pretty common as it provided insulation from the cold drafts coming in between the planks. In a brand new boom town just the bare planks would be appropriate but as the town grew, and survived, wallpaper would appear pretty rapidly. Plastered walls not so much unless its an adobe building or the owner is quite wealthy (the local cattle baron for instance). Construction was pretty standard with planks nailed to both sides of the frame.

Wall paper samples from stores like Home Depot or Lowes often have small enough prints to use.

I've seen pictures of the inside of sod houses with the interior papered with newspapers

If you want wallpaper for your interiors of Western buildings, just go here : link
7 different choises, free download.

I use scrap booking paper. Very inexpensive and there is a large variety of prints. I found one that I use for tar paper roofs on some of my buildings.

Try looking these over:

link

Thanks for the ideas :)

So victorian wallpaper would work? I kinda of always thought of that as something you'd see in a fancy new york townhouse, I figured out west would have been rougher and mostly just boards.

An idea for floors in Southwest adobe buildings would be the ox-blood dirt floors. I had a friend in college whose 19th century adobe in Santa Fe had them. Beautiful and durable.

The frame buildings in Lincoln, NM, had wallpaper but plank floors.

Like real ox blood mixed into the dirt? yuck!

I'm gonna go with wood planks for the floors :) I'm trying to put together some semi-modular resin buildings with different styles of walls, like one set will be horizontal siding, another will be vertical planks or board & batten on the outside, but I want the insides to look good too. I think I'll probably do it with thinner vertical planks on the bottom half and then flat to be like wallpaper on the top half.. kind of like wainscoating or whatever it's called.

My grand parents house was built in the 1880s. Three rooms and was considered a large fancy house for the time. The family owned 100s of acres. One room was the living room with a bed for the parents and girls. The boys slept in the other roomwith was used for entertaining. The third room was the kitchen. No running water until the 1950s and no plumbing until a bedroom was added for the youngest daughter in the mid-1960s.

There was a separate smokehouse and a outhouse with a thin yard rope between it and the house for night visits. Those are vivid memories. By the way my grandmother lived to be 90 and never slept a night anywhere but there.
Interior construction. Plywood with later tongue and groove remodeling in the 1940s. Between the walls newspaper was stuffed for insulation. The outside was old dark gray as it had never been painted. A tin roof from the 1920s and a front porch that extended between both doors of each room. The kitchen on back with a cold storage room off it. A small porch with a wash tub for laundry and other stuff. Lol.the still stands on the rocks at each corner with a 2 to 3 foot raised open air bottom. Thanks for letting me share the memories. Oh yes all electic lights hung from the ceiling and not in each wall.

That my father parents place. There were also some old buildings on the property as well as in the area. Many of the pre 1900 houses were used as hunting cabins until the 1970s or later. A few were used to store hay for the cows in the area if any.

The dog trot house was on display by the county next to my office for a few years. A two room house in most cases though I did see a fancy four room one once. They were balanced. A kitchen on one side and bedroom on the other. A lot of socializing on the porch area between the two. The inside of several of the older ones were like a shell. Just the outside wall and no interior walls in the kitchen side.. The bedroom side did have interior wood walls but they were not smooth like plywood but rough.

The shotgun houses are also common in the area. They are long and slim. Over time most have had interior room walls added except for those used to store hay..
All of the houses were single stories with outside wall fireplaces.

If you are talking true old west style houses, do not forget the very common sod house which are not depicted enough in games. I looked at only a few in Kansas but I do remember any details.

Cool thanks for the info. Was those corrugated tin roofs something you'd see in the late 1800's or more of a 1900's thing?

What I'm planning to do is make 2 different buildings, both around 4x6", 1 will have vertical board & batten style walls and the other will be horizontal wood siding, but the sizes of all parts will be the same so you can mix and match if you want. There will be different walls like 1 with windows, 1 without, 1 with 1 window and 1 door, etc. Then I plan to have 1 angled roof and 1 flat roof so you can stick minis up there.

They'll be like basic shops, I'll probably do a few different top signage parts and I'd like to try and do optional roofs for over the front door. I also plan to have them stackable so you can easily make 2 story buildings too. I guess a lot like you see with the laser cut wood buildings, but I want to go with resin so there will be a lit more detail. We're going to be building them in 3D and printing out the wall sections, giving the wood lots of deep grain so you can drybrush them real good. Kind of going for the style you see in Tabletop World's fantasy buildings, only western.

Then once those are done we will look into other bigger and smaller buildings, like saloons or jails and other things. I'd like to do also eventually adobe buildings and a sod house could work too :)

I did not mention the fanciest house in the area from that late 1890s era. It was simply called the Smith house. Our area of Alabama and Georgia had the largest gold fields in America until California. They mined ours constantly in the 1800s and reopened them in WW2 and the 1970s when gold shot up. The quality is now very poor.

Anyway, the Smith house was a famous hotel, saloon and brothel of the period. It was unique because it was two stories. The very fancy part was the imported glass windows and mirrors. I went into it before it was renovated. Stairway was carved in detail along the rail and ending balls. The mantle was also highly carved in the sitting room. An oval glass was in the front door and was slightly frosted with detail. Five or four small rooms upstairs. The last time I went into the house was in 1975. It also had a different roof that I had seen. It was tin but in overlaying sheets. It was smooth except where the sheets over lapped. They were about 3 feet wide and had a ridge running down them. Hard to really explain and I am not sure if this was a 1930s era addition.

Many buildings were very well constructed. There was an incident in Alabama St Clair county in around 1870. A family that had refused to serve in the CSA had a running feud with a family consisting of several ex members of the local home guard. The home guard boys had the support of the local sheriff. The renegades were pinned up in a local hotel at the end of town where they were meeting with other relatives. An all day shoot out occurred. After many minor injuries and a few serious wounds, the renegades gave up and marched to jail. The newspaper account said that it took almost three months to dig all of the expended lead out of the house walls and doors. The concept that so few serious wounds were suffered indicates to me that the walls were thick enough to stop multiple bullets.

Scrapbook paper section at Michaels or anywhere else should do it. Also, there are dollhouse sites on the web, where you can print out walppaper for free.

Some Old West buildings are pretty damn fancy. There are a few TMP guys that make Museum Quality interiors.

I like the old Adobe, Mexican look, with sparse decor and plaster over brick.

Fine, black Sandpaper makes EXCELLENT Tar paper in that scale!!!

AFAIK, One of the improvisational/pragmatic solutions for not having wallpaper was to paste up sheets of newspaper to make up for any wind gaps in the walls.

YES!!!! Jus found my long lost box of plastic HO scale barstools, chairs and tables!

Now It's time to build a 15mm cantina