Renedra Ramshackle Barn

I bought one of these kits unintentionally recently. Unintentionally? Well, I was buying some other bits from Mighty Lancer Games and wanted to get over the threshold for free postage. This seemed a very useful building to add to my Lord of the Rings scenery collection along with the Games Workshop Rohan Houses already in my shopping basket.

The kit is about as simple as you can get; there are three sprues, two identical ones each with a roof half and sidewall for the main barn and a reversible end wall for the small lean-to, and another with two different end walls for the main barn with different doors, plus the single sidewall and roof of the lean-to. So there are just six pieces for the building and four for the lean-to. The two roof sprues also have some accessories in the form of a pitchfork, cartwheel and ladder, making a grand total of sixteen parts.

Doors and windows are all integral – the sidewalls each have a window, but one can be covered by the lean-to. There are no optional pieces, so the only decisions you need to make are exactly where the lean-to goes and which end to put the doors.

So assembly should have been a doddle, but for some reason I couldn’t get the pieces to stick together with superglue. Initially I thought it might be the cheap poundshop glue, but switching to Loctite didn’t help either. So in the end I reverted to Humbrol Liquid Poly – this stuck everything together safely, I’m not sure why superglue didn’t work – it might just have been a bad day.

Once assembled, I sprayed the barn with Army Painter Leather Brown, and when dry stuck it to a base cut from 5mm Foamex. A mistake I made here was not painting the base first; the barn lives up to the Ramshackle part of its name and has a number of holes in the walls, through which the white base was clearly visible. I spent a while poking an old brush loaded with dark brown paint through the holes to cover up the white bits…

I also added some of the accessory pieces plus a barrel taken from a GW kit to the base.

Painting was straightforward – I gave it an overall wash of Agrax Earthshade, then gave it several drybrushes of increasingly lighter browns. The only other painting needed was to pick out the ropes hanging from the doors, and the hinges in rusty steel.

I smeared a home-made mix of PVA, sand and brown emulsion paint over the base and once that had dried, drybrushed it with mid-brown and bone. I finished the barn off with some Woodland Scenics bushes and some long fibre flock (manufacturer unknown, it came from eBay).

With Mighty Lancer’s already very good prices, plus a discount voucher they sent with a previous order and the free postage it worked out to be a bargain. But having built one I’d say this was a very good item even at full price.