Milk Carton houses

[flaja]

I once had a craft book that gave instructions for using pint milk cartons to make houses for a Christmas village. Some of the designs used clay that you roll out, inscribe with a design and then bake to give the effect of a brick building and others used sandpaper cut into strips to indicate shingles. If you used these techniques what kind of model train scale would the end result most closely resemble? I realize that you could simply make up a scale and say what you make represents a certain sized house, but you’d need some sense of proportion- you couldn’t say a Cape Cod house made from a milk carton represents a 500 foot wide house because a Cape Cod house wouldn’t be that big. But how would you determine a realistic scale?

 

[Irongrave]

being in the building trades there is a size for everything and milk cartons could make some nice starting points for houses i say run with it and experiment.

 

[RW&C]

I'd guess HO at the smallest (school lunch sized containers maybe), S would probably be about right.

The biggest issue would probably be that they aren't quite square and flat. But if you're adding brick and roof texture, you could probably get away with it.

Might make good mock-ups at least.

 

[Gary B]

Peabody - Quick! The wayback machine! I used mike cartons to make skyscraper towers when I was a kid. At That time I covered them with construction paper and detailed with crayons. I like the one brand of orange juice cartons because they were flat on top. One warning, you can never get milk totally removed from the lining of the carton and after awhile its starts to smell sour. My theory has always been its not what you start with but what you end up with that counts.

I had totally forgotten about doing that stuff, thanks for the mind trip back!

 

[jeffrey-wimberly]

I saw those in a an Child-Craft book many years ago. The worked out to about 'S' scale.