The front of the cottages are now progressing quickly. I've refined the process of bay window building which has speeded things up no end. This is a good job because there's a sole stack of them to make on the the other buildings! 

 The doors are rather attractive with their arched windows. I'm wondering whether to have the panels picked out in cream. It's hard to remember just how colourful houses were before the advent of double glazing and the now ubiquitous white paint. I have some lovely slides my parents took of cottages in Llan Ffestiniog in the 1960s, they show a great variety of colour schemes.

With the window and doors installed the building is really coming to life. All this effort to show off a few steam engines!!

I first made a quick mock up of the window to check the proportions. The photos are almost exactly to scale when I offer them up to the model...

The final result is a rather delicate affair, the roof provides a lot of the strength. I need to make the walls that surround the space in front of the cellar before I go much further. There is an enormous amount of detail in a very small space on this elevation. The iron railings could be interesting to make, I am wondering if some '00' etched fencing might be cut down for the purpose?

I'd forgotten just how fiddly these bay windows are to fabricate! The replacement, lower profile window is now finished and looks much better proportioned than the original, which was over a scale foot too high. The next window to be tackled is the front of this cottage.

Obviously the current window is a replacement, so I need to decide what it was originally like. Probably not too different. I wonder if the top widows in the bay had mullions or stained glass? Fortunately the door appears to be an original or at least dating from the 1930s.

Well, after the absence of a year, some progress is finally underway. The baseboards have been reassembled in the garage. With the mild winter so far, the conditions aren't too damp at present. Sadly the back scene papers have bubbled up and have had to be discarded. A trawl of the internet to find the original supplier has shown that they are now produced in a water / damp proof material. Hopefully this will be more suitable as the curved back scene boards didn't lend themselves to the soak and stretch method.

I am going to focus on completing the row of houses this Christmas. Having met a resident of Borth y  gest this summer with local knowledge, I shall now refer to them as the 'pilot cottages'. These houses were where the pilots lived who brought the sailing ships into Porthmadog. This explains the distinctive bay windows giving views of the estuary and the slip way for the boats they used to row out tho the ships.

Having revisited the building this summer a few errors have been noticed. The proportion of the chimney breast is not quite right and I have reduced the size of the chimney at the top. It's a bit of a compromise, but I don't have the heart to throw away the whole elevation. I'm quite sure I am the only person who will spot the inaccuracy! The right hand bay window is also too high. I am going to remake this from scratch. With these two corrections complete I can crack on with the road side elevation and all the complex bay windows and cellar steps.