Viking Longhouse

I had quite a few viking gifts for Yuletide, one of which was the Sarissa Precision longhouse. It's a really characterful building, though as with all mdf kits can look a bit flat, something I wanted to attempt to remedy. So I decided to add some texture to the building walls, in the shape of wooden coffee stirrers. These are easy to cut, trim and glue, it just takes a little extra time to add some basic beams to make the building more lifelike, less flat pack.

If this had been a standard building, this could have been the end point, nice and simple to do. However, this is a longhouse, the residence of the jarl and it has a very fancy roof, which complicated matters a little.

The new beams made fitting the side roofing a little more challenging. The usual precision fit was affected by the addition of the coffee stirrers, resulting in some gaps where pieces would normally have butted together. I also had to trim some of the roof supports because the coffee stirrer beams had covered some of the holes where they were inserted - I had mistakenly taken these to be window slots. Not a catastrophe by any means, just a little extra work to get it all together. The roof gaps I filled with wooden poles from an incense jar. My vikings don't like the smell of manure, they prefer the sweet smell of lavender and pine.

With the roof poles added the build is nearly complete. The roof tiles will have to wait, I will probably buy some from warbases. When these go on I will make sure they fit right up to the walls, so all current gaps will disappear.

I am really happy with the end product. The little modifications have taken me some time, but I think it's well worth the effort. As I said, without the complication of the side roof it would have been really easy to do.

I think more modifications are needed, as the roof corners each need a pole to support it. And I am toying with the idea of replacing the rather uniform struts with something a bit more rustic, it shouldn't be too hard to do. Something to make it look more like the Trelleborg viking longhouse.