Construction: 2010 September

I'm two months into construction on my new layout, but methinks I should start a blog to post some progress photos and tips, since I found these useful on other blogs.

I'll run through this and catch up on two months of photos with some comments:

[07-Sep-2010] This is what I started with. Completely empty room (roughly 19'x14'), bare concrete floor and walls (top half of walls overlaid with about 2" of pink Fiberglas insulation wrapped in plastic), open studs for the ceiling, unfortunately no studs on the walls, and a single dim lightbulb in the middle. Unfortunately there's two plastic pipes in the way down the left side, but I can work around that.

[16-Sep-2010] I replaced the single lightbulb with five 4-foot fluorescent fixtures and it's looking much better. Studs are laid out with a horizontal pressure-treated lower piece on the floor, then the vertical stud laid parallel to the wall offset by the thickness of a 2x4 to leave room for the insulation behind the top half.  Bottom is screwed to the lower member, top is screwed to the floor joists above. Nothing is secured to either the wall or the floor. In this photo I'm starting to put up the backdrop, which is 4x8 sheets of 1/8" hardboard (aka Masonite) glued with LePage No More Nails construction adhesive.

[13-Oct-2010] This scene looks a lot happier; the backdrop is all up and painted. The right half of the room will be mountainous and only need half the backdrop height as the track will come up above that level. The section on the left will be a yard at the lowest elevation of the layout, so it needs the full 4-foot backdrop height. Backdrop is painted with a couple coats of white primer, then blue #059-63 from RONA for the sky colour. My artistic skill for drawing and painting is frightful (I can't draw a convincing stick man), so I was terrified of ruining the nice smooth blue sky, but I went ahead and used The Clouds cutout templates from New London Industries and some Krylon flat white spray paint, and after a few attempts at practicing, they actually come out quite well. The key is to keep the template a little away from the backdrop, maybe 0.5" or so. If it's right snug against the backdrop you'll have an unconvincing sharp outline of the cloud, but the small separation gives a nice feathering effect. Don't worry about a lower half for the cloud at all, the overspray is highly desirable for producing a realistic fading effect. Start at the top of the backdrop and work your way down, overlapping the lower cloud on the overspray from the previous cloud. I found you can do about 10-12 linear feet (2-foot high backdrop) of fairly dense clouds per can of spraypaint. Spraypaint, however, is highly undesirable in an enclosed room. Despite my best efforts at ventilating the area, and wearing a dustmask (prevents breathing paint particles, but not fumes) and trying to breathe as little as possible, I could only work for 20 minutes or so before taking a break to recover.  Much ventilation and a respirator would be recommended.