“And there’s a great set of jugs in there!” said the salesman with glee and, if I’m honest, I couldn’t say no. At that point money changed hands and the Renedra Mud-Brick house in hard plastic with additional extras pack (including aforementioned jugs) was mine. As regular readers of this blog will be aware, I have aspirations to own my own Afghan village and this model looked like a great addition. However, never one to use things “off the peg” I decided that I would have a dabble with doing a minor bit of amending in order to make this into something a bit different. In my mind, I knew that I wanted to fill out the village centre a bit. I had the small row of shops, but I wanted something to add to that which would combine residential with retail so the centre of the village could merge seemlessly with the residential compounds.
The first step was to knock up the model. Here is used the four walls, the roof and the stairs to the side. I intentionally left off the short sections of wall which come with the model as my intention was to add my own walled compound. I used dense blue polystyrene for these new walls, much top my joy I found an off-cut which was almost the perfect size so I didn’t need to mess about doing much sawing and other nonsense. I just trimmed the wall sections to the right height and then stuck them in place with a hot glue gun.
The plan was to put small vegetable garden in the compound, but even so the area looked a bit open and featureless to me, so I used one of the small wall sections which I had not used to create a small area where I would put a large pile of rubbish to clutter the whole thing up a bit.

Next I added an area outside the compound which would be used to display the jug seller’s wares. This shelter was in the additional extras pack which on reflection may not be very robust. In the past I have made awnings for my North African buildings by drilling into the base board and glueing cocktail sticks in place before making the awning from paper tissue soaked in PVA. You can see a snap here…
This Renedra model will, I fear, not have the same robustness for storage, but I can always replace this using my tried and tested method if one breaks. For now, it provides Achmed and his impressive jugs with shelter from the sun, and that’s fine.
I then used the hot glue gun to fill in any gaps. This is a real time saver and a cheat, I just gun the glue on and then run my finger under a cold tap before smoothing the glue flat. I’m sure the Lard Island Health and Saftey officer would have kittens at this method, so DO NOT DO THIS AT HOME. But it works great!
With the model essentially done, I trimmed the top of the walls with a sharp knife to get rid of the regular appearance and then used a mix of polyfiller, PVA glue and sand to paint on the walls. I’d normally use tile grout but I have run out and I honestly could not be bothered to drive to Homebase. I also bought the wrong type of polyfiller when doing some DIY and thought I may as well use it up. Lets face it, any old rubbish will do the job.



I was going to fill in some of the gaps in the Renedra model carefully with green stuff but, ultimately, I couldn’t be bothered and just slapped on this gloop. At the end of the day we shall see what it looks like when it is dry. What should happen is that the polystyrene and the hard plastic should at least marry together well visually as thye have the same gloop on them.
This will need to dry overnight, but tomorrow I will be painting this up and then Nick and I have a day of gaming planned on Wednesday (with a full step by step report to be published here) by which time the Achmed the jug seller should be in business. Here is how his little business will fit in with the existing high tech shopping mall. Ahem.