TTCombat Terraced House (Experiment)

Initially I was going to use a little Pollyfilla to remove the detail at the corners of the walls to make a smooth transition. In the end I didn’t bit in retrospect I should have at least filled the points where the tabs join as these stand out quite a lot and don’t look good.

But anyway I started off by priming everything with a Rust-oleum matt grey primer. This gave a nice smooth finish.

I wanted a little texture on the exterior walls so I mixed up some Crown Sandstone house paint with some fine sand and PVA and used that as the first base coat. After that it took about 4 more coats of thinned down sandstone to cover the primer and get the colour and consistency I wanted.

The interior walls were done in a ‘Sand’ hobby shop acrylic (again needing about 4-5 coats). I didn’t really have a good brick colour so I mixed up some ‘ochre red’, ‘burnt umber’ and ‘sand’ acrylics to get something that looked good enough for a base colour. It might be a little dark but I’ll try and lighten it up in later stages. Floors and stairs were done in ‘burnt umber’.

The roof I gave a single coat of ‘slate grey’ house paint. Some of the lighter primer still showed though but I liked the look with the slight variation in colour and think it will work well.

I’ve bought quite a few MDF kits over the years. I really enjoy building them and seeing them come together but every time I go to paint one I am completely daunted. I spend ages reading advice, watching YouTube and BoW videos – there is so much different advice out there – do I wash with PVC, just use house paints, do I need shellac?? I spend so long researching it that I end up doing nothing. Well it’s finally time to bite the bullet and just go for it. What could go wrong?!

For my first piece I’ve decided to go for the Terraced House from TTCombat. At just £7 this is a pretty cheap piece so if it all goes horribly wrong I won’t be crying too much.

The rough plan is to spray prime, and mix up some textured house paint for the bare walls. Other large areas I’ll try to do with house paint as well and then use miniature paint for the details.

The Build

Now I know it’s probably better to paint the pieces on the sprue – but when I see a kit I get excited and just want to get it built! Also I think the built piece helps me visualise the final look better.

The build was a doddle. There are no instructions in the pack, but TTCombat have detailed PDFs on all their kits on their website. All the pieces were secured to the sprue with just 2 small tabs and everything fit together snugly with no filing or adjustment required. All-in-all – for £7 I’d say this is great value for money.

Unusually, unlike most other kits I have, the two stories don’t come apart – instead access to the interior is achieved by removing the rear walls in 2 sections. Haven’t seen this before – it works quite well but it does leave a big gap between the two stories at the rear.