Ork outhouse Part1

After the success of my box earlier in the week we decided to make an ork outhouse for our ork camp! It has been fun and surprisingly easy and simple to make. Not entirely accurate, but I thought I'd have to make quite a few of these things before any of them started to actually look good anyway.

All you need to make a basic wooden building is some form of wooden sticks, pva glue, and a cutting implement and cutting surface. These are just craft things I picked up from hobbycraft for a pound or so for a bag each. Much cheaper than balsa wood and just as good for things like this. Any pva is glue is good - and trust me, pva glue is far better than you think! I can't believe how strong it sets. A scalpel isn't bad but something designed to go through wood would be preferable, and any cutting mat or board will do but the grided ones do come in handy.

I started by making the door and door frame. I cut the sticks to be just higher than my chaos space marine horns / just taller than orcs. This actually ended up being each stick cut in half with the rounded ends taken off. I used the big ~1cm wide sticks for the door, and the smaller ~.6cm ones for the frame.

I wanted a rickety shack type of look, and I wanted it to be extra strong to I glued the door pieces together using matchsticks layed across perpendicular, with a thick-ish layer of pva along them. Further down I show how I glue these on for sturdiness.

As you can see on the right, rather than glueing the pieces of the frame to each other I fixed them togethed using matchsticks across the joins. I did this for two reasons; I won't get glue spilling between the pieces and showing at the front, and it will result in a stronger structure.

I measured up the sticks for the walls by eye. To add strength to some of the joins in this I put a little dollop of PVA gue either side of the matchstick as well.

I made the walls out of horizontal slats cut from the larger sticks. I stuck them together as you can see with multiple matchsticks and kept the slats uneven. I was also careful to be imprecise when finishing cutting the individual pieces out of each of the sticks so that it wouldn't be neat and tidy. Much more orky this way!

You want quite a bit of glue when putting support sticks in these things. PVA will bond strongly and set quite hard.

It can be a bit fiddly using tiny sticks covered in glue. Here's how I get them on easily; layer of glue, hold close over destination, drop, gently push down. Don't push too hard - pva will just smoosh everywhere until it's cured. That's it's main downside, because it can take a while for PVA to cure enough that it won't shift about with the slightest nudge.

Checked to see if the door looked ok- just had to trim one of the sticks a bit.

Trimmed, glued and plopped into place. Made it wonky to distinguish it as a door a bit more from the rest of the woody structure. Also glued a side panel on so the front was a bit more than just a door.

I made the roof out of the smaller slats. Roughed the edges and made them uneven for a more worn and damaged look.

Finally for today; a 1:1 mix of VMC chocolate brown and water was slathered on the inside of the walls. Because it's not all perfectly fit together you'll be able to catch glimpses of the inside when viewing the hut. Painting the inside means you won't see bits of glue and lolly stick - ruining the painting and weather on the outside!

I'm going to put it all together and finish it in a couple of days when we're back at boyfriends house.