House

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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Bye, Bye House!

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I been neglecting my blog lately because at the beginning of April I made the last effort to sell my house. The house had been for sale since February 2015. We had two offers on the house, which both fell through. I had over 100 people come through the house. According to the realtor, the house needed updating. The wallpaper needed to go. I had the wallpaper removed from the bathrooms in March 2015.

I came to realize that most people were looking for the finished house they saw on HGTV or the DYI network. Currently, I am boycotting all home improvement shows because I refuse to do the cheaper stuff they show on TV. I also figured out why most home improvement shows like “open floor plans”. They say it is to be near the family. But, it is cheaper not to rebuild a wall. No wall, electrical is needed in the wall. Why to do think men wants a “man cave”? It is to get away from the family.

For 6 weeks, I: trimmed bushes, pick up limbs, wash windows and walls, touch up paint, called the handyman to replace rotted boards, painted the new boards and side of the house, repaired the steps, striped a post and refinished it, repaired the garage door (yes, the spring broke), painted over the wallpaper in the foyer, took the blinds off of the foyer door and painted, put window film on the foyer door windows, took the wallpaper board down in the bathroom and painted, and had three windows replaced because the seal was leaking.

Finally, another offer on the house. Thank God, I do not have to trim the holly bushes. But, I still needed to finish packing, get the furniture moved, and have the AC serviced.

Here are some of the final pictures of the house after I moved everything out.

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I do not believe that anything I did over the past few months made any difference in selling my house.  I believe that the right time to sell finally had arrived.  I hope the new owner are happy with the house.

Now I can do other things, like write in my blog about my new adventures.