Foam Building - French Farmhouse

Thanks to my buddy Logan, I received this when he travelled to an IPMS show. Looks good from the outside. 

When flipped to the inside, these have a great deal of work needed to clean up for smooth walls. 

A close-up of one of the large sections. You can see the bubbles and extra resin debris. 

So I thought I could use these as a template to cut my own in foam and try out some techniques I learned from books and the web. The windows were created from 18 pieces of foam. I cut a hole in the foam where the window was to go, and strung the nichrome wire through to make the cut as close to the outside of the window as possible 

Some more of the walls. You can see the filler I used. It is white Gorilla Construction Adhesive in a 74ml tube. The bricks were etched in the foam using a Liang Model Brick Graver. The brick size in the original resin sections were more in-tune with 1/35 scale or larger bricks. These are more in scale. A pencil was used to define the edges and a brick-shaped piece of wood was used to press down some for effect. 

More sections created. 

Final section based on the large resin casting. The 3 smaller pillars are used as wall supports as can be seen in the next picture. To make rock-like texture, a crumpled up piece of tinfoil was rolled onto the foam. 

Testing the sections together. My main reason for this scratchbuild project was that I needed perfectly flat inside walls so that I can create destroyed floors and debris piles. 

More testing of the sections. 

Another view of the test sections. 

Here are some of the wooden roof/rafter sections I will use. Some will be attached to the walls as broken but still in place, and some will be used as debris with bricks/detritus on the INSIDE of the building. This is the reason I needed smooth inside walls. I will detail the inside walls/floors in days to come. 

Close-up of the balsa wood sections. I glued the pieces together with wood glue, being very careful to not get glue everywhere. Once dried, I used a dark wood stain on them. The 3 smaller sections have been treated with a silver wax-based paint to portray older wood. I am not sure if I will continue with this treatment or not...still deciding that.