El Grande Hotel
RSLaserKits # 4022

The package label refers to this as "Zelda's B & B" - a "turn of the century hotel or a restored bed and breakfast as found in most small towns." I want to use it as a hotel for my Old West layout, so I've renamed it the "El Grande."

The kit consists of a bunch of laser-cut wood, a sheet of window glazing, and several sheets of shingles.

Assembly according to the directions was fairly straight forward. As usual, I painted the pieces before removing them.

I painted the exterior of the building Plaid Apple Barrel Canary Yellow (acrylic) and the trim with Model Master Wood (enamel) The veranda pillars and railing, the lower porch pillars, and the stair risers, steps, railings and landing with Plaid Delta Ceramicist Magnolia White (acrylic.) The chimney was painted with Floquil Boxcar Red.

I learned something about painting - don't paint pieces with fine structure before removing them from the surrounding wood. In this kit the stair railings, the porch and the veranda all have thin posts or other narrow parts. My acrylic paint tended to fill in the cracks between the part and the surrounding wood. This glued the pieces back together and also tended to hide the tiny, uncut spots that kept the pieces from falling out of the surrounding wood. A thinner blade than my X-Acto knife might have helped. I found that the narrow posts and railings tended to break when I tried to cut them loose. They also seemed to bend easily, so the acrylic paint may have softened them. Perhaps they needed to dry longer. A solvent-based enamel paint might have lessened this problem, but probably wouldn't have done much to prevent the paint from seeping into the laser cuts and gluing the parts back to the surrounding wood. In the future I'll wait until parts with fine structure are removed and assembled before painting.

Perhaps the broken railing on the veranda and the broken frame on the porch will give the hotel a bit of an "aged" look. If so, the broken railings on the rear stairway should really give the place a well used look!

When I assembled Arkwright's Store I applied glue to each strip of paper shingles before placing them on the roof. However, the roof of the El Grande is about two and a half inches long, so the paper strips of shingles

were a little difficult to handle. Rather then getting glue all over the place, I followed the suggestion in the instruction sheet and covered the roof with double-stick tape. This worked pretty well. After got each strip of shingles into place I pressed all along the upper edge of each strip with the points of my tweezers (as if I was nailing it down) to make sure that the paper was pressed firmly to the tape.

I created a sign for the El Grande Hotel with photoshop. I started with the graphic created for Arkwright's Store. I created my own with Adobe Photoshop. I resized the sign to 600 x 225 dpi at 1200 dpi resolution. I filled the background with a slightly darker yellow and changed the border to a dark orange to match the trim on the building. I used 6 point Italic Nimbus Roman No9L again for the text. I printed the image at maximum resolution with Janet's Hewlett Packard Deskjet 3915 onto a sheet of heavy card stock.