Building another Flemish farmstead model

Six or seven years back my twin Sons built for me the scale model of a Flemish farmhouse.

My Sons’ model represented the main building of a large farmstead dating from the late 17th-Century. The actual farmstead, exhibited at the Open Air Museum in Bokrijk, Belgium (Museum's site here), is known as the Contzenwinning Klein-Hoeselt farm and consists of four half-timbered buildings.

(Picture from here)

I intended to build the models of the other three buildings of this farm (the stable, the horse shed, and the bake house) at some later time, and about two years ago I decided it was time to set to work. 

However, while reviewing the many pictures we had downloaded from the Bokrijk website, my attention was caught by another farmhouse: a large half-timbered longhouse featuring a thatched-reed roof and a beautiful brickwork gable wall. 

I found this building so attractive that I took the bold decision to build a model of this other farmhouse instead of completing that of my Sons’! 

This other farmhouse, also dating from the late 17th - early 18th Century, is likewise part of a larger homestead, known as the Kilbershoeve Meehuven farm.

(Picture from here)

It consists of the longhouse itself  (being the well-off Farmer’s home with attached barn and two large compartments, one definitely a livestock shed, the other perhaps a storage room); a large hayloft and cattle stable building ; and a bake house. 

(Picture from here)

After some research on the Internet, I could get a pretty fair idea of the four side views of all the concerned buildings. However, as I worked from photographs, the actual dimensions of the buildings could not be discerned. 

This was not too big of a problem, though, because building an exact scale model of the homestead was simply out of question: in order to keep the size of the finished model within reasonable dimensions, the buildings had to be compressed somehow, and the size and relative proportions of some of their parts modified.

The project took about two years (of intermittent work) to complete, but I am very pleased with the end result. 

My early 18th-Century Flemish farmstead model is entirely built from scratch, flowers included. I used cheap, recycled materials, mostly cardboard of various kind, craft paper, and home-made papier-mâché.

In a series of future posts I shall provide detailed descriptions of how I went about scratch-building my model, including the three main buildings (the longhouse, the stable, the bakehouse), as well as the many ancillary structures and terrain elements (the outhouse or privy, the well sweep, the shed with old-style straw bee skeps, the vegetable garden, the manure heaps).