Looking just a little run-down, but here's my O-scale Elk Valley General Store and Office in my workshop, under construction. She measures roughly 6"x 9"x 10" long.

The roofing material is 1x12" HO-scale basswood (roughly 1/2" x 6" in O-scale) and was scraped lengthwise to make the pieces appear as hand-split cedar shakes (shingles are sawn), stained with various shades of my alcohol / shoe dye mix and then cut into roughly 1,600 individual shakes (about 60 shakes per row) with a Northwest Short Line chopper. It took 7 packs of Mt. Albert scale lumber to provide me with enough material for the 1,600 shakes.

Later, I will use weathering chalks to reduce the colour variation a little.

The walls were cut from Mt. Albert milled basswood siding and painted, detailed and weathered before the 4 walls were glued together. I needed to brace the wall sections in a very rigid manner because they warped badly after painting them with Polly S acrylic paints. For some unknown reason, even though I painted the walls on both sides, they still warped. Interestingly enough, I have never experienced this when using the solvent based Floquil paints - even when I have only painted one side of the wall…

Since the Elk Valley Lumber Co. (EVLC) layout is not yet built, I built a simple base for the Merchandise building so that I could display it. Once I have the yard section of the EVLC L-girder under frame, I can "plant" the building including the base right onto it.

The walls were weathered with a dry brushing technique. I also used weathering chalks to represent a "run down" look. The basswood siding was detailed with a sharp X-Acto knife to show the siding joins and a dress makers pin held in a spare X-Acto handle for the nail holes. I used Polly S "oxide red" paint on all the holes to represent rust.

The windows and doors are Grandt Line detail parts and were glazed with clear styrene. The paper blinds were added later.

Once the wall sections were complete, I glued them together and added strip styrene to represent the foundation.

More coming later...