N-Scale Build of Christmas Village

My venture into scratch building took an exciting change last month with an order for six buildings and with the craftsman style buildings I envisioned, that should take until the end of the year. Wrong! My client wanted a “Christmas Village”, the kind you’d find on a mantle.

I had primarily been building kit-based structures for display in my bedroom/office and for sale on my website,

Now it has turned into a serious, growing project. It started out with two or three houses and is now up to eight buildings with four of them personalized with family names. Thankfully, she has added a week or two to the deadline. .

This Christmas Village project has taken on a life of its own and I have been devoting most of my working hours to scratch building and kit bashing and have four ready to go. There is a lot more to the process than you might expect.

The client furnished me with ideas for subject buildings and I start from there.

1. Research a given building through Google Images to come up with a subject with multiple viewing angles.
2. Estimate building dimensions by extrapolating known window or door sizes.
3. Here is a key step; I enter the resulting building dimensions into the program “Model Builder” from Evan Designs. This allows me to come up with a set of wall layouts (including window and door placement) to scale to work from. I add lines to one set which lays out the wall framing.
4. Using scale timbers from Northeastern or Kappler, I erect a set of framed walls to the scale desired. They actually closely resemble real life contractor framing; only I use glue where they use nails.
5. I like to let the framework dry three or four hours. In a project like this I tend to work on two or three buildings at the same time to occupy the drying time.

To get a rough idea of the dimensions of such a building, I started with a couple of known values. In this case, the personel door on the shed. This needs to match one of my stock N Scale personnel doors, 2.5 feet in width which can be used to deduce the heighth and width of walls for a general general store.

With these simple dimensions, I open up my Model Builder program which I use to generate a make-shift set of plans for the country store. It allows me to create a printable plan with overlaid wall studs to work from in scratch building.

After Your Break