Homesteading, Part 1 - 28mm Cabin for Colonial North America

Well, games set in the French and Indian War mean specialized terrain for the period, at least if your brain works like mine. After all, you can't have tomahawk-toting Huron fighting in the ruins of Stalingrad, right? Of god forbid, some sort of gothic 40K monstrosity.

What I'm trying to say is that this is the first of several period-appropriate buildings I plan on scratch-building for our games in the period.

It's built in much the same way as the log building I scratch built for my eastern front terrain, which can be seen most prominently here, where I also showed off my split-rail fencing for the FIW project. However, I tried to take the lessons I learned from making that cabin and apply them here to get a better result.

Those lessons were, primarily: 1. the dowel rods I used as logs looked far far too uniform; 2. I notched them by hand with a craft knife, which took forever and murdered my hands; 3. the insulation or chinking between the logs looked unconvincing, and in some places you could see the superglue I used.

I intended to take some progress photos for this cabin, but I got sucked into the work and it didn't end up happening, so maybe on the next one.

First I used a mixture of real twigs and dowel rods for the logs, using my craft knife to add a little more texture to the smooth dowel rods.

Second, I used a Dremel tool to roughly notch the logs and fit them together. This was still slow, building up the wall log by log, but it was much easier than cutting those notches by hand.

Finally, I used some wall spackle to fill the gaps between the logs, which I think resulted in a very convincing chinking. Historically, this was usually a mix of red clay, straw, and sometimes dry manure.

I did elect to paint the whole thing. Some modellers may think painting wood to look like wood is silly, but I think it helps tie various different materials together and give them a cohesive look. It also let me make the white wall spackle any color I wanted. I'm sure I could have gone more grey with the aged wood, but I feel like the average person wants their wood to look a little bit brown, even if that's not totally accurate. Something like grape flavoring not tasting anything like grape, but being instantly recognizable as grape.

I added a covered porch to give the building a more varied and lived-in feel, the planks are coffee stir sticks.

While I have different ideas for the other cabins, I wanted to give one of them a fully stacked-stone chimney. I did this by gluing individual bits of small gravel to a frame made from foamcore board. I think it looks fairly convincing. I hit it with a couple different washes to try and give it some color variation, but it did end up being mostly just grey.

The roof is removable, it's put together from foamcore, some pieces of cardboard, more sticks, and the shingles were cut and glued on individually.

The interior is simple enough, but I did have to go and give it a plank floor. I just can't stop myself from over-complicating things sometimes.

The large (maybe too large?) windows offer excellent places to keep a lookout or shoot at marauders.

Of course, it's not realistic to think that the cunning Huron raiders won't eventually get away with lobbing a torch inside, resulting in a nasty fire.

Where the vengeful sachem Hardheart goes, English settlements burn...

By morning, there's barely anything left.

That's right, I did make a burned version of this cabin too. At this point I'm beginning to think I just want to bring suffering on myself. This extra version didn't take so long, but it definitely added to the project. However, I think that in our games we'll have quite a bit of settlement raiding, and it would be nice to have some burned buildings, especially if we end up fighting over the same area multiple times.

That's all for now, going to be starting work on the next cabin soon, but it's likely to take a little longer. Not sure what the next post will be, but you shouldn't have to wait too long.