WWG Burned Down House 02

Continuing on from last week, I'm going to review the second of the World Works Games' burned down buildings. Like the first one, this is also a kitbash, as opposed to part of a regular set, but this time it is a two-storey building. The addition of the second floor makes it more difficult to build than the single-storey house but even so, this is still an easy model to make and a one that I'd recommend for beginners to the hobby to try out.

Note the addition of the planks of wood on the floor in the photo above. I'll mention where they come from later on in my review. It will probably come as no great surprise to those viewers who have been following my work on my WWG model reviews that I have added my own slant to how the building should look that differs with the instructions.

The major change that I made was with the walls and floor of the upper level. The original model comes with four walls and a U-shaped wooden floor with a big hole in the middle. I decided to make the floor an L-shape, running along the back wall and wall to the right as shown in the photo above. The main reason for doing this was to make it easier placing figures on the ground floor. With a big opening in the front wall and left wall I have plenty of room to get my hand in to move figures around. Although the hole in the original floor was big, I just felt it was too restrictive and it didn't fit in with how I wanted the model to look.

Another reason for doing this minor conversion is that a lot of bricks have gone missing from the walls of the ground floor. I was dubious about there being enough left to support all four upper walls and floor. In my mind the ground floor has taken far too much damage, particularly in the corner where my staircase is. However, I did include the fragments of two upper walls and a small piece of flooring in the corner diagonally opposite the two relatively intact upper walls. This piece of flooring is just big enough to support a single figure, a sniper perhaps.

As you can see from these photos my upper floor is reinforced with foamboard. I usually do this as an aid for the placement of upper floors of most buildings that I make. In this case, the upper floor is not removable. It is purely a matter of consistancy with my my other models that I added the foamboard.

Because I did not use all of the upper floor provided, I had a fair bit left over. So, seeing as it was a wooden planked floor I cut out some strips of planking to various lengths and glued them in place on the ground floor as bits of rubble and debris.

As with the single-storey burned down building, this has a timeless quality to it, allowing it to be used in countless time periods. I do have one criticism to make of this model. Notice that the outer walls on the ground floor get darker the higher up you go, until they are almost black at the top of the walls. This is fine, as smoke rises and the walls should look like this. But, all of the exteriors of the uppers walls are light coloured with no smoke damage visible at all. I find this particularly jarring. I'm toying with the idea of giving the upper walls a Citadel Badab Black ink wash to help make the transition from lower wall to upper wall smoother.

As an interesting aside to anyone purchasing this model, instead of (or perhaps, as well as) making it as a two-storey building you could make two single-storey buildings out of it. Worth thinking about, and the beauty of it is, once you've purchased and downloaded the model you can make as many as you want in whatever combinations you desire. The only conversion you would have to make on the upper floor is to cut out a gap for the door. Hmm, this has possibilities for a future project.