"Scratchbuilt interior for the Warhammer Lake-town house kit" Topic

A recent post on LAF got me thinking about the Warhammer/Citadel Laketown House model again. I'd admired it when the first posts popped up here, with folks talking about it going sold out in hours from becoming available, and decided I had to have one or two for myself. I was also intrigued whether it could be built with a playable interior.

As far as I can tell, y'all haven't had any discussions about this model since it was first announced in August 2016. So I thought I'd share my construction and interior design project.

Here are the sprues:

Notice the two two-story building facades in the upper left corner. This was my first clue that this model wasn't intended to show off the interior. I couldn't build a detachable second story without whacking each of those pieces in half. So I did – vertically, just under the second floor overhang. It was a very fiddly cut, since I couldn't use my handy steel ruler to guide my hand. But it came out *fairly* straight:

Still, I thought, those smooth interior plastic walls with bulging sections corresponding to the outside windows and doors are not ideal to represent the interior layout, even with a lot of surface work. So I pulled out some cardstock calendars from my bank I'd been saving, measured three times and cut out some interior walls:

Also notice that the two second-story facades are double-sided, so no card was required for those walls. The two sides don't match, allowing those assembling multiple kits to add a little variety, but it does mean that the inside wall (and window) won't match the outside wall. Oh well.

So, prior to assembly, I prepared all the interior walls by scoring them and marking board ends, and also experimented on doing the inside of the second-story window (with mixed success – need to make a better effort next time). Mixing ochre, burnt umber, brown, white and black acrylics I got from a craft store (far cheaper than my usual Foundry paints), I tried to shoot for a heavily weathered interior and exterior, keeping the beams darker for contrast:

Finally, I'm quite happy with the bare interiors on both floors. Plus, as near as I can tell, I'm the first gamer to post online pics of the Lake-town house complete with interior!

Mind, this is still a work in progress. I haven't painted up the nets and other miscellaneous gear that is modelled on the building exterior and on the various other bits and bobs I haven't yet assembled. And I'm not sure I'm really happy with the weathered wood of the dock and platforms. Comparing it to real-life pics, it's far, far too dark to really represent weathered wood. I'm fairly happy with the dirty blue on most of the exterior walls, but still can't decide if I should redo all the docks and platforms in pale weathered wood.

Next step will be to do something with the interiors.

I'll post further pics in a few days, once I see if anyone is interested in commenting or offering suggestions. Rather than use this as a Lake-town segment as such, I'm more thinking of using it as a marsh village, but the platforms and rowboat will still work out great.

That's just insanely brilliant! You sir are a genius.

Dan
PS. They should have provided a similar pre-cut textured plasticard inserts for the customer.

The thing that I should've done – but didn't – was paint the walls and floor *before* permanently gluing them in place. Painting the boards was unnecessarily difficult.

I also painted the doors on the inside, whereas if I'd planned ahead a bit more, I could have given them some more depth with at least a border and a doorknob. And I forgot one of the exterior windows. <slaps self upside the head>

Live & learn!

W

Lol. Well, if those little mistakes start bothering you too much, I guess you could always line those two sides with new paneling. :)

Dan

Awesome conversion, really inspiring! Great work!

Bother me too much? Naaah! There's always the next project.

So, here is the second installment of this project. I have scratchbuilt eight bits of furniture to fill the interior, but decided to leave them mobile so they can be moved or removed as necessary to place figures.

The bookcase, the stairway, the trap door, the large and small beds, the table and the chair were all built out of cardstock (old bank calendars). The stove is an inverted golf tee I found in my yard. The large bed's headpiece is a plastic handle from some pool supplies packaging. The bookcase was the most fiddly, since for the books I cut out dozens of tiny (3x4mm approx.) rectangles from card, then glued them together in groups of 5 or 6 before placing them on the bookshelves. This gave a satisfactorily uneven appearance, as if the books were of different sizes, or just haphazardly shelved. In the foreground of the above picture are all the bits and bobs that were actually included with the laketown house kit. I decided to mount them in groups on standard 25mm washer bases (tarted up to look like boards) rather than glue them to the house or the docks directly – so as to keep things more modular.

Here you can see the bed inside the first-floor interior, with its nice headboard. It's funny, I had stuck that bit of plastic in my pocket meaning to toss it in the trash… was my subconscious already telling me to use it on this project?

Here you can see the stairs a bit better. Notice the door under the stairs. Gotta have somewhere to keep annoying orphans until they're ready to lean wizardry!

Here you can see the bookcase and trap door a little better. I still can't decide if I should paste a flat black sheet of paper under the trap door to simulate the darkened depths below.

Here is the second stage of the house exterior, with an assortment of barrels, baskets and wicker fish traps, as well as a tavern sign cribbed from the internet and printed to the right size to be pasted in place before being doctored a bit (google = "tavern sign" <g>)

Next step will be adding an exterior chimney for the stove, a bit of moss & vegetation on the house, maybe doing something more with the interior walls. OR maybe just call it good enough, dullcoat it all and move on to the next project.

Sweet!!!

You're dangerously close to inspiring me into a new range.

Dan

Maybe you'll succumb like I did. I stumbled onto this kickstarter project with a slew of medieval houses on offer. It looked so good I took the plunge! It's the first kickstarter project I've actually backed with real money! It's looking like nearly 300 euros well spent. Has anyone looked at their stuff?

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/162592473/tabletop-basement-28mm-tabletop-terrain-townhouse?ref=nav_search

Need something to accompany my Warhammer Lake-town houses. <g>

You sir, are killing it. Keep it up.

Xin/Jeff