May/June 2022I always say that a porch is to a house what a nose is to a face. Sure, there’s a humorous wrinkle to that statement, and yet I’m making a point. The porch does much to impart character to a house. In the prototype world, porches are modified more often than any other feature. Sometimes porches are shortened; sometimes they’re lengthened. Sometimes porches are torn off com-pletely. Sometimes they are added where no porch had been. On still other occasions, porches are closed in to make additional rooms. We can make any of these modifications to our kit houses to give them unique character.
I like kit structures. Out of 227 struc-tures on my HOn3 layout, 16 are kits. Great kits are available and I’m OK with having the same structure on my layout that everybody else has if it’s the best fit for a scene. Still, there can be a certain advantage with a kit modification which makes the structure seem like a unique model of a real place.
A Common Kit
The HO scale Grandt Line row houses come three to a kit. I like them so much I have six of the structures on my layout. I built them without modification, and all six are nice features of my finished scenes.
In looking around the finished layout searching for things to be improved, I realized that the repetitive appearance of my six houses is noticeable. These houses without porches portray proto-types from Telluride, Colorado, so one cannot say they are unprototypical. But Colorado mining town houses with porches are more common. I decided to add a porch to the Grandt Line house at Coke Ovens. Of all six of these houses on my layout, this one is most conspicuous.
Easy Modification
My porch addition began with a piece of Central Valley board fence for the floor, glued atop a piece of plain 40 mil styrene for solidity. This is a wonderful product because it can be used—obviously—for a fence, but also for board sidewalks, siding for sheds, and roofs on lean-to structure additions.123
For porch posts, I used the com-mercial porch post castings from Grandt Line. Other manufacturers also make porch posts. I like gluing plastic to plastic and since I’m adding a plastic porch floor to a plastic house, I made the posts and roof out of plastic too. Some porch posts are square, and some are round and plastic square strips or rod in scale six-inch cross section would be about right as alternatives to the turned posts. When modifying a completed model, I scrape the paint off the areas to receive glue. Gluing plastic to paint makes a very weak bond.
Roof panels from the Grandt Line house kits are packaged and sold sep-arately for scratchbuilders. I cut three pieces of this roof material for the porch roof. This makes a perfect match for the shingles on the main roof of the house.
Alternatively, a person could cut pieces of 40 mil plain Evergreen styrene sheet and then glue on shingle material or paper to represent rolled roofing.
Still another option—and this is an ideal one—is to use a porch roof from the Walthers Two Story House with Garage kit (part 933 3792). This fine kit comes with two styles of porch roof so that the builder can do a kitbash without bashing (maybe). For the Grandt Line house, use whichever of the Walthers porch roofs ends up being extra; it’s a perfect fit! When I added the porch to the Grandt Line house, I had not yet bought the Walthers house kit. Now that I have the extra porch roof, certainly another structure improvement will be in the works!
A Unique House
This project was easily accomplished in an evening. With the addition of a porch, the Grandt Line house takes on an entirely new character. It is now unique, and that creates the impression that it is a custom-built model of a real place. Now when I see the modified structure in my Coke Ovens scene, I get that warm-fuzzy feeling that I have made a good layout improvement!