One of the fun things I like to do for family members is to make miniature (1:160, conveniently) houses of our family homes. My first project was a 1950s built home of my grandparents, then my grandmother's childhood home from the 20s-40s, I made a model of my own home, and I'm going to do my other grandmother's home next. Well my aunt was taken by these little homes and asked if I would make a model of the house she and my uncle raised my cousins in from around 1960 through the 90s when my aunt and uncle moved out. She wanted to give this as a gift to my cousins for Christmas. Challenge accepted. She provided a picture and details that weren't in the picture, as well as drawings of the room layouts, room sizes, etc. Very helpful, but still not enough to do it right. SOOooo - - punch in the address to Google maps, get the aerial view so I could trace the outline of the roof and shape of the pool, then street views to try to obtain details not in the photo. Nice thing is there were a lot of houses in the neighborhood that are the same model. For paint I was able to mix colors and match most of it but I couldn't get the house color right. Quick trip to Home Depot with picture in hand, hit the Behr paint chips to find a close match and hand the guy 5 bucks to get me a sample jar of paint matched paint and I'm good to go there. Finally finished the models Thanksgiving week so my aunt would have time to figure out a display case and get them wrapped. I used FDM for the base, roof, pool and pergola out back, then resin for everything on the main structure, fence parts and the tree trunk/limbs. I didn't mention that i have five cousins that were raised in this house, so.... Overall I'm pretty happy with them. Love the way the pool turned out. If I had more time I would do the roof in resin but with the time crunch I had to cut corners and print them with FDM as unfortunately every resin roof configuration I tried just warped horribly. Anyway - Christmas is coming up and if you need a cool idea that they'll love, make it personal and build them a home! Cheers -Mike
