Some Building Works

A bit of an unplanned diversion this week. Our friend and Sunday host Barry has mentioned a desire for some cork "native" buildings to me a couple of times and said he liked the ones I created a few years ago.

I directed Barry to the source of all things magical involving cork floor tiles and wargaming, here:

Afghan Buildings - Matakishi's tea house

However, last Sunday, after our AWI game, Barry told me he had been unable to locate any cork floor tiles (except some that were self-adhesive) and asked me if I would be happy to build two towns worth of buildings for him, say three or four buildings per settlement?

So last week, I sourced a pack of 9 x 300mm x 300mm cork floor tiles, and work commenced on Saturday.

All the plans were taken more or less directly from the Makatishi blog - I just reduced a couple of the dimensions of some of the basic buildings, to provide some variety.

Here is my progress so far:

Mr Makatishi is a clever man - very little waste from a 300 x 300 tile! To ensure I got things right, I drew out plans on graph paper to scale.

And then marked up the actual tiles, based on my plans - this is the mosque and minaret (above)

This is one tile cut up to build two of the two story buildings

Progress so far - the tiles are a great medium to use, very easy to cut with a Stanley knife, and pretty simple work to mark up doors and windows and cut them out too. the one at the top left, with outside stairs to the roof, is my own variation!

And what they will hopefully end up looking like - these three images are from the Makatishi blog site.

And finally, as Sat 1 June is officially the first day of winter here in the antipodes, I thought I share an image of our back garden on a winters day :)

Now, back to the building site - hopefully I can squeeze in a bit of painting work this week too!