House

Tinkercad’s House Challenge

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Tinkercad regularly has challenges that tinkers can participate in. I decided to participate in the House Challenge. Why, because I love buildings. I like to explore buildings that are older and unique. I am not limited to mansion or plantations. It could be a building like a simple church or and old manufacturing building.

Tinkercad defined its challenge as: “Dive into the Tinkercad House Challenge, a space where big ideas and bold designs come to life. Create a house that’s entirely your own, using imagination and architectural thinking to shape it into a dynamic 3D build.” You can read about the entire challenge at this link: https://www.tinkercad.com/challenges/jq8yddObGqU-house-challenge

After looking at the template they provided, I wanted to create a small, but tall house. I quickly decided against that, because if the house had five rooms, that would be a tall house. Then I decided on two rooms per floor. 1st floor – kitchen and den. 2nd floor – bathroom and adult’s bedroom. 3rd floor – children’s room. I debated if the children’s room should have access to a bathroom on their floor and if the children should have access to a balcony from their rooms. I decide no. Most older houses only had one bathroom. A balcony off the children’s room would probably be too dangerous. Yes, if my room had a balcony I would have tried to jump off of it or climb down to the lower level. When I extended the floor over the balcony and added a window, this gave it the feel of a tutor house. So, I added the wood effects and colored it accordingly.

A lot of the feature of the house were created with Tinkercad’s extrude sketch shape. Wow, I have not reached the limits of what I can do with that shape. The room, windows, upper outside doors (except the knobs), table, chairs and cabinets (except for the knobs) were made entirely using extrude sketch.

The trees, bushes, clothesline, swing, stairs, doors, oven, refrigerator, toilet, ceiling fan, shower curtain and faucet knobs were made partially with extrude sketch.

The bushes and trees:

The bush was made with a cylinder for the bush’s trunk and Tinkercad’s new shape, revolve sketch. The flower on the bush was created with extrude sketch. As I was working on the house, Tinkercad introduce new features into it Extrude Sketch shape. Twist and Scale. I could adjust the top and bottom of the shape and twist it. The tree was created.

All the items in the house were created by Sarahcath. Maybe not this year, or last year. I did take some items from my other designs. Plus, I made two adults. Dad (mustache made with extrude sketch) sitting on the couch with a remote in his hand, and mom hanging laundry.

Here is the link to the house in Tinkercad: 3d Design Modified Tutor House by Sarahcath. You can look at the house, copy it, download it from the link. I sure I am missing some aspects of the house. Take a look.

Plastercraft Houses – 2025

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I did not finish a lot of houses this year, only four. Below are last three I finished. Only the Chocolate Shop is California Creations. The other two are labeled Creative Craft. They are very similar to California Creations making me think that when California Creations when out of business, they may have sold the molds to this company. I have no evidence, but all the houses have the same feel.

Chocolate Shop by California Creations:

This is one of the houses I placed in the category of Rescued Houses. In 2016, south Louisiana Flooded, the Rescued House sat in water for a few days. You can read about the rescued houses in my blog, Rescued Houses – Part One. There is some damage to the houses that were rescued and the paint cards our gone. I painted this house with the colors associated with chocolate: Dark Chocolate, Buttercream, Reds, Pink….

Tony’s Pizza by Creative Crafts:

This is another Rescued House. There was a little bit more damage than the Chocolate Shop, so I decided to make the building look old and worn.

DOS Taco by Creative Crafts:

I had the paint card for this house, but I did not like the lime green curtains shown on the paint card. I went in my own direction.

#Tinktober the First Ten Days

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This year Tinkercad is hosting a #tinktober event to provide design prompts to their tinkers. Here are the designs I have created in the first ten days.

Haunted House – Day 10: Notice the ghosts in the windows. If someone really wanted to, they could fix up the house and rid it of the ghosts. Or, they could make it scarier.

Full Moon – Day 6: Each of the trees are made with at different basic Tinkercad shapes.

Pumpkin Carving – Day 4: Check out Day 2 to see where I got the idea for the carving. I also placed a candle on the inside of the pumpkin.

Candy – Day 3: Don’t forget to dump out the candy so you can see what types are inside.

Black Cat – Day 2: Okay, it is just an outline of a black cat, but I added a loop so it can be used as a keychain or a charm. You can easily print this design. The others would be a little bit tricky.

Costume – Day 1: I decided to design a fairy costume. Since my fairy lives in a forest, the costume was made out of leaves.

I did not participate in all 10 days, because there were some prompts that I wasn’t interested in recreating, like bugs.

Rescued Houses Part 5 with Trees

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This is the fifth post about the houses I painted after the flood of 2016. If you interested in learning more check out Rescued Houses – Part One.

This house is about twice the size of the ones I normally paint. After sitting in the flood waters for a few days, it has some damage to its plaster. Some of the houses the damage with too extensive to attempt to save.

The trees survived the flood without damage, because they were in the boxes higher up. Yes, I placed all the heavier objects/boxes on the bottom to keep from crushing the lighter boxes.

The trees were painted green then dried brushed with white paint.

Plastercraft Houses – Set One – 2023

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They’re back! Yes, I have painted some more plastercraft houses in 2023. Two of the houses, Brass Lantern Shop and White Horse Pub were released, unpainted, by California Creations before 2010. Around the time, the company went out of business. The Shire Church was release by Colorbox, which still make things to paint but mainly for children. At the rate I am painting houses, I should have enough houses to be painted until about October 2064.

Brass Lantern Shop

White Horse Pub

Shire Church

Railroad Town – Mayor’s House

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After I completed the Town Hall in Tinkercad, I knew I wanted a house for the Town’s Mayor. For months, I thought about what I wanted in the house. For example, I wanted a porch or balcony for the mayor to stand on the talk with the citizens of the town.

My inspirations come from looking at old buildings. All the pictures I saw for “Mayor House” was big opulent mansions that just did not fit my town. It wasn’t until I travel to Aurora, NE and visited their museum, that I found the style of the house I wanted for the town. Behind the museum was the Bate’s Houses. Its architecture and age was exactly what I wanted in my design. It was painted blue, but I wanted something special. I decided to color house pink with brown roofing to make it different from all other buildings in my town.

I placed the wooden path in front of the house, because the mayor’s house is located on Main Street in my Railroad Town. I placed a picket fence around the yard. I wanted the fence curved to add some character to the design.

The mayor’s house needed a flower garden. I create one rose and stem; then to create the bush I duplicated it, changed the angle, rotation and position.

One detail that everyone will probably overlook is the gate. On the gate it has a latch and hinges that would actually function if they were 3D printer

You can view this design in 3D on Tinkercad at this link: Mayor’s House

Dog House

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On October 15, 2020, I created a Restaurant in Tinkercad for my Railroad Town. A few days later, I made the design Public and Tinkercad designated the design as a “Favorite” As of November 23, 2020, the Restaurant has 420 likes, 141 comments, and 1000s of people copied it. Below are images of the Restaurant. You can view the Restaurant in Tinkercad at this link: https://www.tinkercad.com/things/lP7Wk4g6jI4

Tinkers from around the world has asked: “How did you make it?”, “How did you get the wood texture?”, “How …?”. Instead of recreating the Restaurant to answer their questions, I made a video when I created a Dog House in Tinkercad. It shows the basic techniques I use when creating the Restaurant.

  • Align Objects
  • Group Objects
  • Creating Holes
  • CTRL +D keys to Duplicate Objects
  • Arrow Keys to Nudge Objects
  • Changing Objects Size and Color
  • Placing the Workplane on a Object
  • Rotating Objects
  • Mirroring Objects
  • D key to place object on Workplane

The video is available on YouTube at: https://youtu.be/2zywVTU4b2c

The design can be viewed on Tinkercad using this link: https://www.tinkercad.com/things/3KxOkw3RJ0H. Below are a few pictures of the Dog House. I know, I know, it needs a dog. That would be another video.

Rescued Houses – Part One

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In August 2016, the storage unit where I kept my belonging flooded.  In those belonging was all my Christmas Village Plastercraft Houses.  Many of the houses, painted and unpainted, was either wet or underwater for about a week.  I was going to abandon them because I had no means of drying or cleaning them.  My sister, who showed up to help me salvage what belonging I could, insisted that I could not abandon my houses.

She took all the wet houses to her flooded house, unwrapped, cleaned, and let the houses dry out while her house was drying out.  After everything was dried, she carefully packed the house.  In June, I was able to retrieve the unpainted houses from her.  She did an amazing job.  All three of these houses have minor damage, but no house is perfect.  Of course, the inserts with suggested painting is gone, so I choose the colors myself.

These are the first three houses that she recovered that I have painted.

Don’s Donuts:  I decided I would paint it the colors of the best donut shop, Krispy Kreme.  The car had to be blue.

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Bowling Alley:  I thought this building needed to be bright and metallic.

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Toy Maker:  Deciding the colors were a little difficult.  What colors would Santa have on his shop?

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There will be more houses to come.  I usually paint three at a time.

Arbor Lodge State Historical Park

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Located at Arbor Lodge State Historical Park is the home of J. Sterling Morton, who is the founded Arbor Day. The home features furniture and art work that is original to the home. It also has an original Tiffany Window that take 15 men to open it.

J. Sterling Morton is the father of Joy Morton who founded the Morton Salt Company.
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