Finished Model Power's "The Sullivan's" Again

I bought another bunch of Model Power house kits at the last train show I attended. They'll help populate Gallitizin. Now, I've already built this kit once. But most houses in a given area are usually built to similar designs so I figured I could get away with repeating myself as long as I painted them different colors.

Anyway, assembly didn't exactly go smoothly this time around. First off, I decided to paint the walls Floquil "Coach Green," which is usually a big pain in the nuts to work with. It's quite watery and runny and as such, you have to slather on coat after coat to get it somewhat opaque. The result being the walls took nearly two days to dry thoroughly. 

This kit also comes with a bright red roof. Since this is a house in a small Pennsylvania town and not a pet-friendly budget motel, that had to go. So I used, you guessed it, Floquil "Grimy Black." I finished things off by painting the foundation Floquil "Concrete." The windows and shutters stayed in their stock colors s did the porch and chimneys.

Let's talk about the windows and shutters for a second, all 26 and 52 of them respectively. What a tedious slog these things are to put on, especially the shutters! In fact I damned near left them off and think I'll do just that on subsequent houses. Not only will it speed assembly but also differentiate them further.

Things really started getting hair when I started assembling the walls. This house is essentially two perpendicular rectangles. You glue one to the other, slightly off center. The roof of one rectangle has a cutout to accommodate the roof of the other. Being an idiot, I glued the one rectangle in the wrong spot relative to the cutout and had to pull the whole thing apart, leaving a nice bit of glue schmootz all over the wall. 

All in all, this house didn't turn out too bad, Wicked Witch of the West color scheme aside.

In other news, I got my two Pennsy geeps equiped with DCC decoders. Being older models, they required TCS "CN GP" decoders. These are basically two small PC boards interconnected with wires. They're actually kind of a pain to install, requiring complete dis-assembly of the mechanism. No, not terrible, but kind of a pain. But that said, it is nice to have another key piece of road power back. That just leaves my L1 mike and my PAs and the entire PRR road fleet is DCC.