In my mission to speed up my village building and supplement my very slow scratch building process, i could not resist buying some more MDF kits. This time from Sarissa at http://www.sarissa-precision.com

I have seen lots of pictures and reviews of the Sarissa French Chateau in 20mm and 28mm scale and I was unable to resist the lure of  purchase. So I figured I better make it worthwhile by buying a couple of their 20mm ruined houses at the same time. The Chateau build is for another time, as I decided to get cracking on the ruins first. The kits come flat packed in two sheets of 3mm MDF with a further sheet of window and door fittings in card. At less than $15 Australian a pop they are pretty good value. The best thing is Sarissa does the postage from the UK to Australia at two pounds fifty which is amazing. Definitely makes me want to buy more!

The parts pop out of their sheets easily and consist of a floor or two, walls and roof sections. The roof sections have a triangular support that gives the structure some strength. So all you need is some PVA glue and bobs your uncle. Once you have the structure made you can add the windows and shutters, door frames and doors. You do need to think ahead about what you are going to paint before you finish building as it might be tricky to paint some bits after full construction.

Now i really like these kits but did need to add some of my own bits and pieces just to get them up to speed. Firstly its very obvious where the MDF corners are, so i used my gyprock plaster to give my buildings a texture, before i added the details. This covered up the joins and created a more interesting surface. I also could not quite understand the chimney construction, maybe i did it wrong, so i also had to add some MDF to line everything up. The chimney pots i cut off and replaced with some excellent metal ones i had bought from a model shop, which i think was a good improvement. I also added my own cardboard roof tiles onto the roof remains which give more texture to the roof than the original flat MDF. I also added textured bricks carved into the plaster along the bottom of the walls and also bits of rubble and debris inside the damaged walls. It was a lot of fun to customize these little buildings, but i think they would come out nicely whether you choose to do this or not.

Painting took me a while and i just used basic acrylics. I added a couple of French signs to the sides and then added some black and brown chalk dust to the damaged bits to give the finished result a burnt out look. I am looking forward to building the Chateau now after these two. If  you need some quick and easy buildings with a lot of scope to customize then go and check out Sarissa. You can see below how well they fit in with one of my home made buildings – the blue two storey house with a big blown in the middle of it…..