Revisiting the Sharbot House

Main floor stacked on basement. They aren't glued together.

Back in early 2017 I started work on building an HO scale model of the house I grew up in. I stopped once I had the foundation and floor made. I was getting bad vibes from the build and decided to set it aside for awhile. 

That awhile has lasted all the way to this late date in 2025. I thought if I'm going to build a Taronna layout it isn't going to be complete, or meaningful to me, without my old house somewhere on it. 

Left: basement | Right: main floor

I needed a different approach than I took with the first model. The plan with that one was to build it in a conventional manner, with walls built around a floor complete with a removable roof to showoff the interior. 

Main floor

While I've been revisiting a number of E. L. Moore posts during my AI investigations I took an interest in Mr. Moore's Clarabel Hotel project. It had a highly detailed interior, and its overall form was based on the fourplex he was living in. It seemed a shame though that its fantastic interior would be blocked from view most of the time.

The hotel has a roof that lifts off so one can look in on the second floor, and the second floor is removable to make the first floor detail visible. It also has an elaborate interior lighting system. I started to think, what if I built the next attempt at my house model completely from the the inside out, and when the interior was finished then decide if I should build an external 'wrapper' to enclose the interior or just leave it open. Leaving it open would be rather unconventional, but it's in the spirit of model buildings that butt up against a layout's edge that leave off the wall that would run along that edge so viewers can look in. I'm not sure how my house model's variation on this idea might turn out, but I'm going to pursue it for awhile.

Left: Main floor from 1st attempt | Right: All styrene main floor for 2nd attempt

I didn't reuse the floor from the first attempt. I liked the look of the wood flooring, but I didn't laminate it properly to the styrene substrate and the whole thing ended up warping like crazy.

Floor from the 1st attempt after considerable flattening!

I couldn't flatten the floor no matter what I tried so I decided not to reuse it. I simply cut all the pieces for the new model's main floor from sheet styrene: 0.060" thick for the floor and 0.040" thick for the walls. It'll be a challenge to paint the walls and floor, or add some sort of floor laminate, but all the pieces are more-or-less square and solid without warps, so at least the structure on this attempt is sound.

Basement

Unlike the 1st attempt this model will have a basement. I envision the layout having a below grade level with some sort of subway station modelled, so since I'm already in excavation mode :-) I thought why not try to incorporate the house's basement. It's going to be a challenge, but I'm game - for now :-)

Still more about cut stone facades

Yes, I am somewhat obsessed with the stone facade on the Weekly Herald, but there is some reason for my madness :-)

I checked the Herald's instructions, and even the front wall assembly step shows random stones, further strengthening my suspicion that only the prototype model had the rectangular stone facade. 

Back when I was starting the build of a model of the house I grew up in, one of the reasons I stopped the project was I wasn't sure about how to build the half-stone facade.

That's a detail of the house's facade near the end of construction. As you can see the cut stones are very similar to those on the Weekly Herald. The house was built in 1957*, and wasn't unusual for small new homes in Scarborough at the time. Even here in Ottawa, they aren't hard to find in older areas. Just down the street are many from that era. I need to see if I have any colour photos of the stone work, and think about how I'd add such stone to the long parked HO scale model.  

*The real estate agent's sign still uses the old 2 letters, 5 digits telephone number pattern. A quick Googling suggests AT is pronounced ATlantic, which I think was in the West Hill area.

Plans for the Sharbot House

I've been sorting through my father's files and was quite surprised to find these plans for the Sharbot House, the house I grew-up in, sandwiched between some old folders filled with medical bills from the 1980s. A few years back I made a start on building an HO-scale model of this house, and spent rather a lot of time drawing up a floor plan from just old photos and my memories. I'm rather pleased to report that I seem to have gotten the overall outside dimensions more-or-less correct: the plan shows the house to be 41' wide across the front, and I estimated 41', but according to the plan the longest side wall is 36'-9", and I estimated 40'. Not bad.

Along with the plans are a set of documents that form what looks like a complete record of the business and legal activity associated with the purchase. Add this to the old photos of its construction I uncovered a few years ago, and I think it makes up an interesting look into building and buying a typical suburban house back in late 1950s Toronto. One of the more interesting documents is the summary my father wrote - shown over on the left - of all the costs associated with the house. Although the base price was $14,950.00, once you added in things like storm windows, fencing, painting, and so on, the total price came out to $16,025.00 (I don't know why he wrote $18,250.00 over on the left). And there was a mortgage of $11,500.00.

As far as a model is concerned, I notice that there are a few differences between the plans and the actual house. For example, our house was a flipped version of the plan. The bathroom arrangement was a little different: the toilet was under the window and the tub was beside the door, which changed the arrangement in the kitchen a little because the new location of the tub changed the shape of the kitchen wall where the fridge fit in. Clearly, a little further study of the plans is called for.

Foundation and Floor

Before any building got started I went back and inked in the plan.

The sub-floor and foundation walls are cut from 0.060" styrene.The floor plan is laid out on the styrene such that the outside walls will wrap around it, not stand on it. The plan looks a little odd because the garage floor and the side door are at finished grade level and the main floor is about 2 1/2' above. I'll need to add in floors for the garage and side entrance.

The kitchen and bathroom floor - in the upper right - was cut from 0.020" styrene, scribed with a tile pattern and painted, and then glued in place. The hardwood floor is made from leftover basswood strips I had in my scrapbox. They are around a scale 6" to 8" wide, so they aren't representative of the width of the actual floor boards, but when stained up - using cedar stain I had leftover from staining the back fence last summer ! - they don't look too bad. The strips are also 0.020" thick, so they join quite nicely with the tile floor. All the strips are glued down with a gel superglue.

Building the floor was very pleasant and I'm looking forward to the next step: adding the internal partitions.

From the wayback machine

Before the house, the subdivision was a farmer's field.

Nothing sophisticated about the footing forms, just boards nailed together and staked in the right place.

But they did the job. Here they are filled with concrete.

The foundation walls were standard concrete blocks. 

Even with that black goop spread on for waterproofing, there were still leaks.

House hunting

[Soon after construction in late summer 1957]

Last year I read Michael Paul Smith's books Elgin Park: An Ideal American Town and Elgin Park: Visual Memories of Midcentury America at 1/24 Scale (he also has a great Flicker site). One of his projects was a 1/24 scale model of his childhood home. I started to toy with the idea of building a model of the house I grew up in and set about drawing up some 1/24 scale plans. It turned out to be tougher than I thought as I only had a collection of photos and my memories. 

I started with the garage plan since the doors are standardized and I clearly recall how small it was because we had to make sure not to bang the car doors against the walls - especially with a big Chevy my father once owned. I had built a 1/24 plastic model of a 1970 Chevy Impala many years ago and it helped me figure out the plan. From there I worked on the garage elevation. I then used the garage as a reference to figure out the sizes of the rest of the house's components. After several weeks of a few minutes here and a few minutes there, I finally had a plan and elevations in 1/24 scale.

[Believe it or not, there is a floor plan and set of elevations on that taped together piece of tracing paper. There were a lot of iterations and I traced new ones from old ones. I need to ink the pencil lines.]

For an average-sized house, it was going to be a big 1/24 scale model. Too big really. I'd have no place to display or store it. And it would likely take at least a year of spare time to build. I didn't do anything, but now I think I might give it a try in HO. 

[The external walls are up and the roof's on. On to the interior.]

I find modelling brick and stone intimidating, and try to avoid it. On the movie store model I stuck on a photo of the facade's stone work, but that didn't look too convincing. 

[E. L. Moore carved stonework in balsa as with this chimney, but I think his technique looks better on rustic buildings. Photo by E. L. Moore.]

On this model the cut stone work on the front wall will be a major feature, so I'm going to have a go at carving the stones in card or styrene or foam. I'm doing a lot of reading on this, and need to practice a few to see what I can do that'll seem credible and not drive me insane. 

[With the walls nearing completion, and the roof still not started, you can get a sense of how these bungalows were built in late '50s Toronto.]

The model won't have a finished interior, but I plan to include the internal partitions and have a removable roof. I suspect the hip roof will give me gas pains too, but I figure once I've learned how to build one, it'll be easier when I tackle other suburban homes because a streetcar layout needs houses. There weren't and aren't any streetcars running in this end of Toronto, but the TTC did and does run buses there - that was one of the selling points in those days because at the time this part of Scarborough was Toronto's hinterland.