A hospital garden

Norman's Riding used to grow as much of it's own food as possible. When you consider other supplies were delivered by the Co-op on a horse and cart it's understandable. And yes, the horse and cart deliveries were delivered by horse and cart well into the 60s - if I hadn't caught the hospital van from school for some reason I did sometimes finish up getting a lift on the thing!

So one thing missing from St. Norman's was a garden for growing food. Happily, Blotz do a greenhouse so I ordered one.

It was easy to put together and came with staging. I'm also painting up a few dogs so I can add photos to the Five Hounds entry.

It fits in quite nicely at the bottom corner of the hospital - which is roughly the right place on the original.

Strangely, the frame is painted green, not grey - but then the green carpet tile base doesn't show as green either.

On this picture it's easy to see that it's a quick paint job - but on the table you can't see the unpainted inner edges of the frame. The staging has just been left as plain wood.

A sheet of A4 MDF fits quite nicely - I might get to work and complete it as an actual full size base complete with 'crops' - have to think about that but would add to the visual aspect.

Miskatonic U preview

Knowing exactly what the problem was with the Manor House I've put it together to give an idea what the actual finished University will look like.

No problems with the gatehouse of course - fits well, looks good. The single coat of thinned paint works well, I'm quite pleased with the effect on the gate. Just the right amount of brown from the mdf shows through.

The gatehouse with the manor house main building behind.

This view gives an impression of the courtyard. The fence is by Blotz -  They're the only decent UK supplier for this kind of fence I've found so far. It would be good to have been able to make the grounds bigger but it has to fit on an A3 board. Even so, the manor house does overlap a bit where the side chimney is. I have plans in mind for that far corner attic floor by the chimney... Still considering the courtyard. I've bought a dark sepia artist's pen and will probably draw cobbles on by hand. Likewise, not sure whether to have the gate there or just use the gate in the gatehouse.

The bad parts... The first picture shows the joints - I've had to carve all the stubs down to make them fit. Looks ugly on close up, plus I didn't know where to cut down at first - so had to do all round. The difference between ground floor (before Sarissa email) and the slightly neater ground floor (only need to shave top and bottom surfaces) is quite clear...

But this is where it really went wrong and I called for help! Tried to force a joint too much and the entire ground floor basically collapsed. Damage to the outer wall doesn't show it all - there was an internal arch that collapsed as well - that actually threw out a few things on another outside wall. Result is that the ground floor is a disaster area - I didn't even attempt any internal detailing on this, plus glued the upper floor floor down to hold things in place  better - couldn't get it to fit properly without springing apart, so used main force until the glue set.

This gives a better picture of the damage. I had tried to shave things down, obviously just not enough...

Knowing the problem and shaving down every stub and internal fitting there were no more problems and it fitted together easily. The replacement should be much better than this effort!

It's just too big...

Today, spent quite a bit of time making up some Blotz railings to go round the park.  Still some touching up of paintwork to do, but basically got it together and loosely set the park up.


I think it's pretty obvious from these two pictures that the band stand just totally overpowers the scene. With it there, there's not really much room for anything else!

Happily, there are always other possibilities. In this case, putting a town clock into the park rather than in a more central, well, town, position seems to be a bit more balanced. There would be other options - perhaps a fountain? Blotz do one that is still a bit big but could be made to fit. There are lots of resin/metal fountains out there, just a matter of how compatible...

The clock tower, by the way, is the one in Downham Market. There was a Caithness Crystal store in King's Lynn and they used to commission Liliput Lane limited editions. My wife Sandra collected these - very useful as they came out around her birthday - and when I saw this one I bought a 'spare'.  They brought out two different clock towers - I've got a spare for the other one as well, so one will go in the town anyway.

Still waiting for the University to arrive - that's  going goiung to need fences as well, so next order will be to Blotz.

Meanwhile, memo to self - must go through and update some of the labels for these posts...