Emma's
I'll confess that I was hooked from the beginning by Miller Engineering's glittering "handful of street" (at right). Had it suited the space, I would have replicated it almost as-is. But this was neither practical nor, in retrospect, desirable, as it wouldn't demonstrate much originality on my part.
Be that as it may, the Pitman Deli kit done up as a cafe (third from the left in the photo) had been lingering at the back of my mind as an idea since the beginnings of the layout. But after the last round of changes to the town, Emma's wound up getting "evicted," finding a new home in one of Miller Engineering's two townhouse kits.
Despite the CAFE neon sign on the roof, Emma's is actually a fine restaurant; it was officially transformed from cafe to restaurant when it was relocated to the townhouse. The arched doorway inspired me to finally build something I'd wanted to make for quite a long time: a canopied entrance, complete with the establishment's name emblazoned on the canopy fabric.
As has been the circumstance for the majority of structure projects to date, the townhouse kit would need to be modified. Owing to its location on the high end of the street (the town follows a gentle slope), the townhouse would have towered over the theater next door and, in fact, would have been the tallest building at that end of town, and it would stick out like an oddly-proportioned sore thumb.
As a consequence, I decided to reduce the building from three stories to two. It should have been a relatively simple modification—just slice off one story. But modifications seem to have this tendency of being anything but simple for me. For starters, to preserve the first floor entrance as well as the roofline details, I'd have to slice the second floor out of the middle of the kit. On the surface, this didn't seem like an onerous task: two quick cuts along the mortar lines, one long solder seam, and then just fold it up the way it was originally designed.
Unfortunately, the windows on the sides of the building gave me pause: the wall facing the theater had three columns of windows, whereas the wall facing the side street had only one, which looked a bit odd. Even stranger, the first floor windows were smaller than those of the other floors. And so every wall was split up into individual pieces so that I could pick and choose the best-looking parts.
Unfortunately, the process of reducing the size of the townhouse had the effect of making the already-oversized block texture seem even more oversized. At that point I was ready to throw in the towel and start over on Emma's; I even started searching for other starting points—I have no end of kits and leftovers, after all. But I kept coming back to what I was ready to abandon. I couldn't find a storefront that wasn't so obviously a storefront—a look that drew me to the townhouse in the first place. So, I was back to where I left off. For a while I entertained the notion of resurfacing the whole building to look like stucco in order to deal with the oversized block issue, but that idea eventually evaporated.
The front wall had the top and bottom floors spliced together, as initially planned. The side walls each comprised the second and third floors (to omit the oddly undersized first-floor windows), with the rooflines swapped. The back wall was a combination of the original back wall first floor plus a scrap from one of the side walls to eliminate the double-window. Each wall was spliced back together before being joined with the rest of the walls. As per usual, the fronts of the walls were sprayed with primer, the edges were polished with a wire brush, and all of the joints were soldered from the back.
After cleaning off the primer paint and tape residue from soldering, I found that some of my soldering left a bit to be desired, so I thought I'd do a little experimenting with something I'd been wanting to try for a while: texture spray paint. It was my hopes that it would not only disguise the less-than-ideal solder joints, but also disguise the oversized block problem, perhaps giving it the appearance of rough stone instead of HO scale brick.
As of 10 October 2008, this is where the project stands. More as it happens.
Inspiration for the cafe started with this street scene by Miller Engineering.
After shuffling several business around, the cafe wound up in this townhouse.
The cut-down walls are temporarily taped together to study in situ.
Chopped-up wall parts are sprayed with primer to act as solder-resist.
Wall parts are soldered together, then assembled walls are soldered together.
After cleaning off the primer, the building is dropped in place again.
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