Scratchbuilding a Potato House - Part 4

Progress on the potato house has been fairly slow over the last week, but I've been able to get a lot of work done on it this weekend. Since the last post on this subject, I have painted the walls, windows, doors, and concrete supports, glued on two different sets of roof panels, added details, and applied masking tape to the roof of the potato house in order to represent tar paper roofing. Most of this work was done over this most recent weekend, but the potato house was painted over the week. Quite a bit of progress, especially on painting, was made in fifteen to twenty minute intervals before dinner on weeknights. I managed to paint the entire structure in these short periods of time over the span of a week, painting one or two walls each night.

The structure was painted light gray. According to the only prototype photo that I know of, at least part of the potato house was painted light gray. On the other part of the structure, the paint was worn off, so I assumed that the entire potato house had not seen a coat of paint since the early 60s at most. This would match with when most potato houses on the BAR stopped being rail served, as most potato traffic dried up with the formation of Penn Central, who apparently let the entire crop of the County rot in a Penn Central yard somewhere in Connecticut or Massachusetts, though I don't remember exactly where or when this happened. At any rate, I decided that in the mid 50s, when potato houses were still well maintained, it probably would have been painted light gray over the entire structure. The doors appear to have been painted dark green in the photo, so that is how I painted them.

The potato house was entirely brush painted as I have no airbrush. It will need to have the paint touched up, particularly on the sections of the walls made from styrene sheet, but I'm waiting to do that until after I paint the roof, as I'll probably have some touch up painting to do from that, so there isn't much point in doing any more painting yet. The paint covered quite well and the brush marks aren't very obvious, in my opinion. In the second photo, you can see where I added an electrical meter in roughly the center of the building. I made it from two pieces of styrene strip, and the top of the narrow strip was rounded with a drop of superglue.

I added roofing to the center section of roof before I added the roof panels on the two main parts of the potato house. The roofing is made from 3/4 inch wide masking tape cut in half along the center and then cut into smaller pieces. The roofing pieces are then built up from the bottom of the roofing section.

I then cut the masking tape that hung over the roof edge away with an X-acto knife. This is the same basic process I use for all tarpaper roofs. I also added bracing for the other roof sections with .060 by .080 styrene strip.

The roof panels were made from .020 styrene sheet and then attached to the potato house with superglue.

Roof finished. This section of roof initially did not turn out very well, and had a very pronounced and unrealistic sag. I cut two new roof panels for it, as I did not cut the original roof panels very square. The new roof panels turned out better and the problem was solved.

The overhanging masking tape on one of the main roof panels ready to be cut off.

Most of the roofing was attached in this picture, with only one more roof section left to attach roofing to. All that is left on the building is to do touch up paint, paint the roof, and weather the entire structure.