Old West Sheriff Office

I started the floor by making a frame for the main part of the building & a beam for the wood slats of the porch to attach to.

Then cut loads & loads of tongue depressor sticks to be the floor boards.

To make them look a little more authentic, I chipped away some of the ends & made little nails holes with the tip of a hobby knife. (Before: on left, After: on right)

While I was test fitting the boards I realized that A.) I did not have enough support beams on my frame & B.) craft sticks are not all square nor straight. So I added a piece of black paper to the top of the frame & then glued my boards onto that. 

 

Here's how it looks all together

The walls were cut out of foamcore sheets

For the wood siding, I took some thin sheets of balsa & cut them into random length strips

I drew on lines on my foam wall so I could glue my siding on straight & have them all overlap the same amount.

Using some round & rectangular Styrene rod I got from a local hobby store, made the jail cell & some bars on the windows

Here's the window first because that one is easy

The jail cells on the other hand took some doing. I took the rectangle rod and cut 4 pieces the length of the building. Then using a pin vice, I drilled holes in them to fit the round rod.

It took a lot of fiddley work, but the finished piece looked great

I also used bits of this styrene on my stove. There's chunks of the rectangle one as feet, the band around the middle of the stove is the round one. The rest of this is made from a small pill bottle, a penny, some thin card, bits from an oil tank & drinking straw.

Back to the building itself. I made a mix of brown washes & used it to stain the floor boards

And added trim around the outside of the building

It's hard to see, but I smooth a layer of spackle on the inside of the walls before putting it together & then add trim inside.

After that, I fianlly attached all 4 walls together, spackled the corner joints, & then painted.

To furnish the inside, I gather a lot of scraps I had laying around. Like a couple posts from the hinges of a makeup container, plus some Sculpey clay makes a decent set of double barrel shot guns

A tongue depressor & some fine chain make a good cot

Wood scraps for a table, gun rack & book shelf

Little pieces of craft sticks & foam core with paper wrapped around them were added for books

I grabbed a little stick from outside to cut up for a pile of fire wood.

I printed off some wanted posters off a laser printer and then soaked them in a sepia wash to make the paper look weathered. (Do not do this from an inkjet printer. That is a water based ink & will bleed once you get it wet.)

I did this for the newspaper on the desk as well; it was a lot easier to fold that small while it was wet.

For the sheriff's bulletin board of case notes, etc. I put the scraps of paper into the sepia wash first, waited for them to dry & then painted on things like a map, or portrait.

Here's what they look like placed

You'll notice I put some window shades up as well. This is the same principle as the wanted posters. I got the paper wet in a colored wash, then wrapped around a wire while it was still wet. A small bead & some thread make up the pull handle.

Now, for the outside of the building. I went & painted the whole thing in acrylic paint

Then went over the whole thing with a rough sandpaper to weather it, then went over the now raw wood with a Tamiya Smoke wash

To build the roof, I cut out a base of thin card to fit with some over hang, and placed row after row of balsa chunks to act like shingles.

After they were all placed, I went through & roughed up the ends so it didn't look so "new"

Then went over the whole thing with varying brown washes & heavy spots of diluted black acrylic paint. Doing the black while the washes were still wet did all the blending for me

Let's go back inside & make some more details. Can't have a desk without a chair, so I built one out of clay. Same with a piss pot for the jail cell & coffee pot. The can of beans & booze bottle were made from beads

I sculpted a set of cow horns from clay

A coat rack from bamboo skewers & hat from clay

And a few oil lamps from beads to finish it off