Stoelzel's Derelict Commercial Building

Last week I finished making my latest card model from the Stoelzel's Structures 28mm scale range of contemporary buildings. This is Carl's derelict commercial building.

It is a two-storeyed brick building with a flat roof and parapet. My figure of Vampifan appears in the first six photos to give a sense of scale. The building has a footprint of 7.5" (19cm) wide by 10" (25.5cm) long by 5.5" (14cm) tall.

Access to the roof is via a ladder leading to a hole in the roof. This should be covered by a trapdoor, but do remember, this is a derelict building. The hole is behind and to the right of Vampifan.

This is the front of the building. Most, but not all, of the windows are boarded up. Please note that transparencies for the windows are not included with this model.

I got round this problem by printing out the four outer walls onto transparency paper and then I cut out the windows to glue in place. 

The back of the building is the only side that is secure from break-in on the ground floor.

This side wall has a door towards the back of the building. I used my transparency paper to make the glass portion of both doors.

This is an overhead view of the ground floor. As you can see the building is devoid of any furniture or props apart from the staircase. The newspapers and bits of rubbish that litter the floor give a sense of abandonment and dereliction. Likewise the cracks in the floor. It is a very good touch.

This is the view towards the front door. The front and side doors were made out of thin card. A piece of masking tape is sandwiched between the front and back of the door to give me a hinge so that I can open and close the doors.

The staircase was quite easy to make. The side away from the far wall is reinforced with mounting board. The stairs themsleves were made out of foamboard. The back piece of the stairs and the side that abuts the far wall are reinforced by thin card.

When I printed the stairs out, they were almost black. So I lightly brushed over them with Foundry Bay Brown 42A so that the stairs matched the colours of their side pieces.

Here you can see that the doors do open and close, a feature of all of my card buildings.

Here is an overhead shot of the first floor (second floor, if you're American). Note that as with almost all of Carl's buildings, the walls and floors are reinforced with 5mm thick foamboard.

I glued the boards covering the windows to thin card, then cut them out and glued them in place. This was quite fiddly and very time consuming but the end result was well worth the effort.

I cut out the ladder that leads up the roof and glued it to a piece of mounting card to reinforce it and to give it a 3D aspect. It is in the top left hand corner of this photo but is hidden by shadows and hard to see.

The hole in the floor for the staircase gave me a slight problem as I had to extend its width and length because I'd made my stairs slightly bigger by reinforcing them. No problem to a man with a sharp craft knife and a steel ruler!

This floor is also littered with old newspapers and pieces of rubbish, although not as badly as the ground floor is. I am highly impressed with this model for a number of reasons. First up, it is a decent size. The texturing is up to Carl's usual high standards and you can see he is improving his textures all the time. It is a very useful building for a number of gaming periods and genres. If you don't go for the level of detail that I include in my models it is a very easy model to make. Finally, the best thing about it is that it is free. Yes, you read that right. You can download it for free from http://www.wargamevault.com/product/111723/Derelict-Commercial-Building?filters=0_0_0_0&manufacturers_id=4244 Go on, you know you want to!