Remodeling The Castle

This shows painted but not yet filled and covered with stucco walls as part of the remodeling. Builder's foam was used again and wooden dowels for the posts. The picture is taken outside where I was working on it.

Builder's foam is available at lumber yards and comes usually in 4 by 8 foot sheets. The technical term for what I call builder's foam is "extruded polystyrene insulation." Dow makes one, and it's blue in color. I prefer using that one because it is more smooth. Corning makes one too.

I use builder's foam for many projects in miniature.

Having had the perfect castle to me, a decade ago, after so much building, scared me. I was done. So I tore apart a third of it, and began again. This is a picture of my kitty, Keeper, crawling through the builder's foam walls.

I picked up Keep as a kitten, in the middle of a road, a pour little feral. He and I fell in love immediately, and he's been with me for 13 years. Great cat! And he's totally afraid of going outside (he still remembers the bad life out there) but he still loves, and don't most cats, the feeling of an enclosure. Safe and secure!

I'd turned to builder's foam because I saw that even outdoor plywood warped over time. That's something Colleen Moore wrote about and so her castle is made out of aluminum. Given I couldn't afford that, I went with builder's foam. I'd discovered it along a roadside, being trashed, decades ago. Hey, this is great--low weight, easily cut and decorated. And that's pretty much what I still use for mini scenes today.

I've always loved Colleen Moore's dollhouse castle and decided I wanted to build my own. I've been playing with that for decades. I also love making any medieval settings, Halloween miniatures, haunted things, and Christmas scenes. Above is how my castle once looked--it's now getting remodeled. It's made from plywood and builder's foam for the structure.