Project Update: Houligan's Alley by FSM

In my previous post I said I was going to try something new. I did. It worked and I am happy with the result. I used real cedar for shingles. The idea itself isn't novel at all. Laser cut cedar shingles are available from several sources. Eric from kitforums.com uses strawberry baskets. Unfortunatelly, in our part of the world strawberrys don't come in wood baskets. Therefore, I was looking for something I could use, something that was commonly available. I found the answer in our kitchen. I remembered having grilling papers in one of the drawers. I got them out but they weren't cedar so being cheap I bought cheapest cedar grilling papers I could find. They turned out to be Elizabeth Karmel's brand. I don't know if I would be able grill anything in them because they are very thin but they are just right for HO scale shingles. The biggest challenge was to cut the papers to strips and then cut strips to small pieces with a chopper. It was very time consuming. There is some room for improvement though. I may invest in paper cutter for cutting sheets into strips or possibly leave ends uncut, put some tape in the middle to keep strips together and feed several strips at once into chopper.
So far I have shingled up only walls of addition to the main Skootz's building. The manual called for shingles to be painted leaving some wood visible. It instructed to glue shingles first and then dry brush them white. That would result in "wood" in deeper areas being exposed and higher being painted over. I am not a rivet counter but I still didn't like it because it isn't the way wood siding weathers. Protruded areas are exposed to elements and start loosing paint first. Deeper areas retain paint much longer. My solution was to paint/dry brush every row individually applying more paint to the base and just a little or none at all to protruding part.  Gluing down process took ions. I used Brian Nolan's technique he showed in one of the Scott Mason's Building Craftsman Kit DVD series. Without it it would have taken me billion years extra though.
Next are two roofs... I wonder what media we will be using for blogging after I am done.