Normandy village part 6

First of all sorry for the big gap between this new post and my last at the beginning of May. My back decided to play up big time which meant I haven't been able to sit down comfortably for any length of time so couldn't post anything of any use.
Enough of the boring stuff.....
I have just started another section of the Normandy village. The first 5 parts of the string of posts cover the making of the first sections. The aim is to build enough stand alone pieces so they will cover an 8ft x 4ft area so there can be a good sized village to fight over using figures painted by Artmaster and vehicles built by Troop of Shrew. The game will at Salute 2013 and should be spectacular when everything is done.
This new section is 28" long and 16" wide. This is bigger than the first section as we want a larger courtyard in the middle.
I started off again by sketching out on the base board the sort of layout we were looking for- there needed to be a larger court yard and we wanted a Town Hall type building at one end but other than that the brief was pretty loose.

The sketch gave me an idea of what space I had to play with and the sort of buildings I needed to design. The town hall is on the right of the photo and takes up a large chunk of the board. I was struggling a little for inspiration for the longer thinner building running along the bottom. I wanted to find something that looked a bit different to the other buildings I had made in stage 1. I went for Google and searched for Normandy building photos and trawled through them until I came across this-

As soon as I saw it I knew that was the one. If I can get the roof and other details right then it could potentially be the centre piece of the town. I had enough laser cut windows still around so before I knew it I had it designed and cut out.

The photos shows the first floor windows all shuttered closed so we decided to do the same so I sealed them off and only left the upstairs windows open ready to put in window frames. At this stage I haven't made the smaller wing of the building as I don't know exactly what space I will have as it will back onto the rear of the town hall so until I have that gap worked out there is no point working on this small extension.
Once I had glued the pieces together (I used my usual 5mm foam board) I started covering it in strips of balsa to resemble the timber framed pattern on the real thing.

the front

I have guessed the pattern on the rear, deciding it would be simpler with no pattern in it as it wouldn't be on show.

the rear

The above photo also shows the extra bracing I have added inside the house. This will help the model keep its shape once I start to plaster the walls. The plaster will go in between all the framing to give it texture and a better finish to just plain foam board. That is for tomorrow as I have left the model today to let everything dry so when the plaster tries to warp the walls it should all stay together and keep its shape.

At the same time as working on this timber framed building, the town hall has started to take shape. We originally wanted a 4 story building but it looked all wrong when I laid it out so we cut the top floor off leaving it as an imposing 3 story building.

Once I have the carcass of the building made I start adding mounting card onto it to make the whole thing more interesting. It makes rendering it more complicated but it is worth it. It gives you ridges to highlight when you paint it and just makes the model more '3D'. I have used black card to make it easier to show on the photo where I have used the card.

The next stage will be to render the whole building and then add a roof, a balcony above the main door and paint it.
That brings things up to date. The next few days will probably see me rendering and plastering both buildings but I want to start on the roof of the timber building as it will be a massive challenge to getting it to look like the real thing. Hopefully the next update will see some progress.