502 Sullivan Ave. Part II

I am way behind on posting updates so I'm going to just get to it.
I've been constructing a concrete walk/stairway along the back of the house. This allows the residents to go from the deck to the back yard and garage area. For material I used Basswood strip narrowed to 3' wide. The first image shows the stairway in place.

With the stairway removed and resting on the building foundation you can see how I carved away the foam scenery to fit the stairway. The Basswood has yet to be finished or painted.

Here I'm test fitting the stairs to the deck and you can see the overall arrangement with the house in place.

And now the concrete has been finished and painted but not yet weathered.

My next post will have the completed house with some detailing.

Sullivan Ave. part III

A detail that I like adding to urban roads is the sewer manhole cover. We have two types in the image below; the Sanitary Sewer manhole (MH) cover and the Storm Drainage MH cover. The larger of the painted ones is for Storm Drainage. These are made by Vector Cut, and if you are wondering, yes they are a little large for HO scale. But the detail on these is SO GOOD, that I will forgive the maker for the size issue. The one piece of Laser Board has 6 manhole covers and 3 storm grates.

My challenge is to create a shallow hole in the road surface that is just large enough to fit the MH cover. I used the hole left in the Laser board as a carving stencil on the road.

Here is the tool I used for the carving. If you look closely you will see that the curved blade has a slightly angled tip. There is blade on the other end with a blade angled in the opposite direction.

And the finished product. If you remember a couple of posts back where I mentioned a pavement patch where I had to blend where the road was made of Wood Filler on one part and Styrene on another part. This is that patch, I deliberately painted it a different shade from the remainder of the road. I just looks like the Sewer Maintenance crew tore up the road and patched it when they were done. I have also begun adding cracks in the asphalt surface. Here I am drawing the cracks with a

.3 mm drafting pencil.

This last image shows how nicely  the MH cover fits into the hole I created.

502 Sullivan Avenue

502 is the address of the white house on this module. The kit is RIX #203 with a scratch built basement added. The house is set a little higher than the road which is very common in the prototype but seldom modeled. When I'm finished shaping the yard, it will have a short steep slope down to the sidewalk in the area near the driveway. I haven't yet decided if the driveway will be paved or gravel.

The window shutters are from Tichy # 8040. I thought I had a problem when I discovered that I didn't have enough space to add shutters to all the windows until I took a walk in the neighborhood where I realized that many houses have shutters on only a few windows. Nowadays shutters are only decorative anyway.

The side deck was made of Evergreen strip styrene 8410 (4"x 10") and 8606 (6"x 6") for the framing plus some scrap sheet for the decking. Tichy make some wonderful turned spindle porch rail, part # 8093 with matching stair rail #8213. The stairway will go down to the left and connect to the deck to the left of the single rear window. At this stage I have just completed the installation of the brick wall along the driveway. I still need to bring the ground back up to the edge of the concrete slab beneath the back deck. I also need a foam filler piece to complete the ground slope along the back of the house. Once the slope is complete I'll then cut the stairway to proper length and install it. 

To make the brick wall I cut pieces of scrap DPM wall sections, beveled the ends and notched the tops as needed.