Rubbish or Raw Material?

In Doctor Who – Pyramids of Mars, Sutekh tells the Doctor: ‘Your evil is my good.’ The same reversal of truth often stands with scratch building models.

You can spend a huge fortune in a model shop buying polystyrene strips and blocks, thin strips of wood or sheets of cardboard to use in the construction of the model in question, and then throw away exactly the same materials as rubbish the next day.

It’s no secret on here that I collect up old coffee sticks and firework sticks post Bonfire Night to use for the wooden planking and beams on my models instead of buying strips of balsa wood, but there are so many other raw materials for building that can be sourced cheaply or for free that can make this a very cost efficient hobby indeed.

My mind has sometimes been described as a scary place. I admit it can tick over slightly differently to many others. It has been known for its darker side, as you would know if you have read the Karl trilogy, but it also tries to see more than is obvious.  Hence any unusual packaging that comes my way is almost always sized up for its potential.

A colleague at work came back from vacation with some chocolaty treats to share. Very nice they were too. However my greater excitement came at the packaging, there I could see exactly what I needed to make more window panes or broken windows from. This is just the right sort of stiff plastic that I need, and this time it is slightly cloudy hence these windows will be either misted over or dirt smeared depending on what effect I’m going to go for this time.

With a growing CD collection of audio drama I have had to invest in a couple of new storage towers. These came as flat packs, and once the Krypton Factor (Look it up) test had been completed without any of the listed pieces being left over I did have left over pieces that were not going to end up in the rubbish skip. These blocks and strips of polystyrene packing will make excellent starting points for walls and other constructions.

All the items in the above photo have been viewed as potential in one way or another and later I’ll share more of these thoughts. In the meantime since my coffee stick mountain is growing I am going to add a couple more cheap and simple buildings to the ghost town layout. The exact style and shape of these will depend solely on the next few empty boxes that come my way.

The first will be made from the Nature Valley, Cupasoup and Gu boxes...

Another evening spent on broken windows

Ring ring. Ring ring.

Hello?

Can I interest you in double glazing?

I’ve got around fifty windows here...

Click burr...

Another evening spent fixing up broken windows on the haunted house, and the other night I miscounted, there were actually another seventeen to do. One Bon Jovi and one Eagles album later this evening, I had got through ten of them. So now there is another seven to do on another night or over the weekend. I think given fair weather and the garden gets done first, then there might be a chance they could be finished by the weekend. Let’s hope so, but I am now running very low on the plastic box so the glass shards are going to be getting much smaller in the windows that are left to do, as you can see in one of these photos.

Smaller shards of "broken glass" from slithers of plastic

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Eight More Done, Another Fifteen To Go

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Remedial Work

Eight More Done, Another Fifteen To Go

Having loaded up the garden waste wheelie bin to bursting point this evening, I once again took a short time out to continue with the windows on the haunted house. I managed to get another eight on one side completed, although you can only see seven of them in this photo. At a quick count I think that leaves me around fifteen on the front face of the building to complete.

Before anyone asks, yes the grass is now almost up to my waist out in the back garden, thanks to the fact that the green bins have only been emptied TWICE so far this year. 

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The Price of Moonlight

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Another evening spent on broken windows

More Cracked and Broken Glass

A little progress update, (no the rubbish hasn’t been collected yet - we’re still wading through THREE to FOUR weeks worth of uncollected refuse) the progress is on the rear of the haunted house.  All the rear windows have now been finished, except for some remedial tidy up work.

The windows are all different in their degrees of damage. One window has miraculously survived in the bottom right of the building. I wonder what forces are at work in that room of the house?

Some are broken with just small fragments of jagged glass in place ready to catch and injure any ghost hunters that might try to get through the windows. On the ground floor where the glass is broken the windows have been boarded up. 

The boards are the same cut coffee sticks as the rest of the planking on the house, but these boards I’ve distressed the edges first before fixing them in place over the broken glass.

For a couple of other windows, they remain cracked rather than full broken. For these I cut a full window square of plastic then I scored it but did not cut it through.

To ensure the glass stays in place, a bit like fixing in old window panes I used thinner strips of the coffee sticks to build window frames which I put in place like beading around the glass.

I think I’m getting the effect that I’m aiming for.

Looking forward to being able to start painting soon.

Previous article in the Mystery Model / Haunted House series:
May Day, Breaking Windows

Next article in the Mystery Model / Haunted House series:
The Price of Moonlight