KC's Workshop : Pop's general Store

[nycjeff]

Here we go with another kit from KC's Workshop. This one is Pop's General Store.



This is a small structure, but you certainly get a lot of bang for your buck with it. Here are the walls, strip-wood, doors and windows, laser cut wood deck pieces, roof cards and door and building trim pieces.



The kit is supplied with several different roofing materials as well as some signs and some screen door material.



The instruction sheets provided give some good tips regarding the prepping of the walls, but at least with the sheets that I got seemed to end with no information regarding the varied roofs.



Here is the sheet showing the bracing of the walls. Plenty of 1/8 square strip-wood was supplied.

[nycjeff]

I started the walls by sanding the edges so that all were square and smooth.



I decided to divert from the instructions regarding the front wall of the store. This wall has a false front the extends above the gable roof line. I wanted the visible part of this wall to be more than just blank wood so I drew some pencil lines to show where this portion of the wall was visible.



I used some of the 2x6 strip-wood supplied with the kit and cut pieces to cover this area to match the front wall pattern.



As you can see, I left a little space at the bottom of the new pieces so that the roof would tuck in under them later on.



Here's a view from the front before I cut the pieces to match the top of the wall. Now both sides of the front wall will have visible boards. This is a small thing, but I think that the wall will look better for it.



That's it for now, more later.

[deemery]

Hey Jeff, this is what I use to sand wall edges, etc: sandpaper glued to paint paddles:

I attach the sandpaper so one short side is folded over, and the sandpaper goes right up to the other side, which allows me to sand against a corner.  Turns out I use these on almost every project!

dave

[Rick]

Jeff, looks like a nice kit and you're off to a good start.

[PRR Modeler]

Jeff this looks like a nice little kit. I'll be following for sure.

[nycjeff]

Here's a picture of the kit from the manufactures website. I wanted to do this first thing but it took me a while to figure out how to do it.

[nycjeff]

Hello Dave, thanks for the sanding tool tip. I can see where that would be very useful.

Hello Rick and Curt, as you can see I finally figured out how to put a picture from a website into a post. This way people can see what I'm trying to do, although my version will of course be different from the instructions. 

 

[GPdemayo]

Nice looking structure Jeff, I'll be looking in.....

[nycjeff]

Hello Greg, thanks for looking in. I liked the looks of this kit. There's a lot going on in a little package.

[nycjeff]

Continuing on...

Next step was adding the bracing to the walls. On the rear wall the designer only called for 3 vertical braces. I added a fourth where the left side wall meets the rear wall. It's the second from the left in the picture below. This additional brace gave me more gluing surface when joining the walls.



All of the bracing has been glued on. I deviated from the instructions once again on the front wall. The kit provided a second front wall layer to give a place for the roof to rest on I guess. This piece is visible in the picture where I'm sanding the edges of the walls. I didn't see the need for this piece. Instead I just added some additional bracing strips as seen in the upper left of the picture below.



Next I stained both sides of the wall with my A&I solution. This step always brings out the wall details, such as the nail holes and and partially damaged clapboards.



Next I dry brushed some Warm White craft paint as well as a little bit of the Fawn color to give the walls a weathered wood texture.



I then started on the wall details. The front wall is shown here. I painted the doors and windows along with the building trim wood with an Advocado craft paint color. The trim piece at the top of the wall comes with the kit as one piece and I think it looks great. The circular Coke sign comes with the kit as well. I did add a piece of styrene to the back of the sign to give it a raised profile on the wall.

[nycjeff]

The rest of the doors and windows have been added along with some signs. As you can see the two bump-out additions have been glued together.



Next came the biggest change that I made while building this kit. If you look at the manufacturers website pictures for this kit, you will see that it rests on a built-up wood beam foundation. This was one of the things that drew me to this kit. I was a little surprised when opening the kit that the material for this feature was not included. Fortunately, I had enough strip-wood in my supplies to build my own wood foundation. I drew a scale diagram of the structures footprint. I used wood that is a scale 12x12.

You can see in the picture below that I made the front deck with 2x10 strip-wood pieces. The kit provided some precut deck pieces, but I like the individual board look better.



This next picture shows the left side deck and a rear deck that I added. The short diagonal pieces at the corners made the whole thing much stronger.



I intentionally left the main beams longer than the structure footprint. I liked the look of this in the website pictures, so I wanted to make sure my version of the kit had this.



Here the wood foundation has been stained with my A&I solution. I think that the time I spent building the wood foundation was worth it. I think it gives the store a more rustic, old-time feel. Next we'll see what the foundation looks like with the store on top of it.



That's it for now, more later.

[PRR Modeler]

Very nice coloring and weathering.

[Jerry]

Jeff nice start I'll be following along to.

Jerry

[Michael Hohn]

I like the foundation.  And your decision to use individual boards is smart.  It's certainly in the spirit of the kit.

Mike

[ACL1504]

Looking very nice Jeff.

Tom