Bar Mills Honest Joe's Pawn

After I installed the retaining wall to cover up a city street module base several weeks ago, I've begun to think about working the rest of that scene into the area around it, inspired by George Sellios, but with some tweaks of my own. I've started with a Bar Mills Honest Joe's Pawn kit, which is about half finished in the photos below:

It's leaning because I just plunked it down for the photo. I'm a little surprised I was able to get it even this far over the course of a week, with the last step being assembling the four walls. This is not an easy kit, though Bar Mills warns on its site that it's in the advanced category.

Among the things that added to the assembly time were the need to brace all the walls on the inside, paint and weather them while flat, and add the signs and windows. A separate job was to paint, add mortar lines, and weather the partial brick wall, and to brace it and glue it to the rest of the wooden building.

I wasn't real real happy with the instructions for the kit, but a modeler with the skills to build it is probably going to work around a lot of the instructions anyhow.

In addition, I followed my recent policy of adding Woodland Scenics Light Dispersing Film to the inside of all new buildings, as well as retrofitting many existing ones. I really like the even effect it gives, while concealing the fact that there's no interior, as shown below:

So an additional project here will be to add light diffusing film to the Woodland Scenics/DPM buildings on this street, which I originally built about 35 years ago.