Homesteading, Part 2 - Another 28mm Cabin for Colonial North America
It's been a minute since my last update — April and early May have been very busy, and even when I've had time, I've struggled to focus on and finish a single project. But with our French and Indian War campaign using Sharp Practice 2 set to kick off in about a week, I felt the need to get my act together and finish some more terrain. That's where this second log house comes in.
This scratch-build uses largely all the same techniques as I used in my first cabin, but has a few other features, most notably the stacked-log chimney instead of a stone chimney and the bark-sheet roofing instead of shingles.
The log chimney was a lot of hassle, but I think it looks relatively convincing, and it has that distinctive early colonial flair. I'm not all that eager to do another one, however. I guess that's the cost of detailed scratch building.
The use of bark sheets as roofing is drawn from the excellent YouTube channel Townsends, where their group of living history enthusiasts put up their own period cabin by hand, using bark strips as their first roof before later replacing it with wood shingles.
I'm not totally convinced by the effect I achieved, but it's close enough, and it was a hell of a lot faster than shingling the whole roof. I used strips of thin cardboard from cracker boxes (the same material I use for my shingles) with some added texture from PVA glue and flocking. If I had wanted to go even more authentic, I could probably have added some rocks and logs to hold on the bark sheets. But maybe this family could afford enough nails to fasten all the sheets down.
The interior is spartan but functional, though I managed to overcomplicate the whole structure by raising it off the ground based on a photo I saw of an existing cabin. Should have just stuck the thing right on the ground and called that good.
I tried to add plenty of windows for combatants to fire from, without going too far overboard. After all, these are peoples' homes, not prepared fighting positions.
A small group of Frenchmen and their Huron allies rove across the farmstead, eying it with malicious intent. No Anglo-American homeowner can sleep easy with the spectre of war lingering in the valley.
After all, it doesn't take much to light up some farming family's livelihood. Just another casualty of the brutal frontier war.
Within hours, there's little left of the home but ashes and charred timbers. Notably, none of the difficult-to-build chimney remains. This scratch-builder breathes a sigh of relief.
I'll leave you with a few photos of the cabin in a recent game of Sharp Practice, where it was fought over lightly but survived without being burned down. We'll see if its luck continues.
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