'Upper Wassen' house #1

There is a 'suburb' of the tiny village of Wassen that I'm going to call 'Upper Wassen' for the purposes of my own mental pigeonholing. I'll define it as the houses between the middle and upper levels of track that are accessed via a tiny road tunnel - barely wide enough for a car - under the middle level that trainspotters commonly traversed on their way up to the Command Post.

At the real Wassen, there is a cluster of two houses and some barns just beyond that small tunnel, and another on the way up to the upper level signal cabin that I made recently. I'm going to model the two and one of the barns up to the right.

I'll start with the pinky coloured house, as I have a reasonably detailed picture of that seen below.  Both this and the browner one beside it may have been built at the same time to a similar pattern, but the brown one behind has a yellow extension on the near wall:

As with all modeling, I'll be taking a few liberties and making a few assumptions, but hopefully the overall effect will be close enough.

A start was made on the front - the most visible and complex side - by cutting some window holes out of pre-planked wood sheet. This sheet is a bit coarse for Z scale, and this pinky house's siding in particular compared to the brown on), but it is what I have.

The houses are three storied on top of a basement/garage, so I've begun that foundation using some fine-scale stonework-embossed card with two garage doors cut-out, and some of the planked wood inserted behind.

The basement was built up around a thick card base to see how that looked, and some of the dark brown flower-topped 'fencing' that surrounds the various porches and balconies made from the same planking, but with the planks running vertical. This was placed on the layout temporarily and trimmed to an approximate fit:

 The three walls were completed and stuck together, with some scribed card in behind to represent windows - in hindsight this is far too light in shade.

The foundation fencing and concrete patio has also been painted.

Before this had begun to set, a pinky shade of paint was formulated and applied, the walls glued onto the foundations, and a roof added and painted. The pinky shade was intentionally made a little darker so it wouldn't stand out so much on the model, although the final model has turned out quite nicely so maybe it should have been more of a showpiece!

More of the fence railings were applied. As they are topped with flowers in the real thing, I dipped the edges in PVA white glue and dabbed them in some model ground cover:

 These were applied straight to the pink sides.... Then a chimney, sun umbrella and a few more details were added, flowers of red and yellow were dabbed on ... and... voila!

Close enough for a passing racehorse not to be completely appalled.