MORE HOBBY BUILDER'S SUPPLY

As I mentioned in my November post about HBS, I was intrigued by their first contest and so I entered it. I didn't win, but did come in third. In 1995 they had a second contest and I was again eager to enter. As they had done in the previous year, the project was to be done in one of three boxes that they offered, a single room, a side by side roombox or a two story roombox. I chose the side by side roombox and started to build my 'modified English cottage'. Of course I enlisted Tom's help in building my house. I told him what I wanted and asked him to do the heavy sawing that I could not handle. I explained that I wanted a small cottage with a high pitched roof; something that looked as English as we could make it. As we worked on the little house, problems came up, but were fairly quickly solved. The cottage was to be a two story and I told Tom that I wanted a staircase that was small and didn't take up too much space. The staircase was easily achieved and then we had to decide how to fit in the necessary rooms on the second floor. As mentioned before, this was to be a small cottage; just for two people, but we needed a bedroom and a bath. Tom suggested making wall dormers which allowed for more space on the second floor and a ceiling higher than there would have been if just a regular dormer had been used. This all worked out so well that we had space for a second floor deck, something that is rarely found in an English house......but I did say that it was a 'modified' English cottage.

The other requirement I had was that this was to be an oceanside cottage and my landscaping had to create that illusion. I didn't know what to use to simulate a rocky terrain, but I had heard talk of the wonders of styrofoam so I started with blocks of that. When I had the foundation high enough, I covered all of the styrofoam with Sculptmold, smoothed it all out and got ready to paint the rocks by using various shades of grays and browns. Surprisingly enough the rocks started to look like rocks and I started to landscape my rocky terrain. Before going any further, I will add a few pictures to show what the cottage looks like on the outside.