Out of the Box

More advances on the cardboard box building front. I bought a few more cheap craft boxes of different sizes and spent the evening puzzling out how to make the components of a credible desert fort. The challenge was to cut the boxes in such a way as to preserve the structural strength of the thin cardboard box while cutting away enough to make the parts I wanted....a bit of a geometric puzzle, but nothing too complicated... just a bit of fitting and trimming to get the parts to butt together. Again, as in the method I described in the last post to make the simple desert houses, the essential "move" is to flip the box lid over and glue it to the box bottom make the parapet/roof.




I live in a small town and the local craft store only had a few sizes of boxes available so the corner towers had to be made with two smaller boxes stacked. But I may take a little drive today to the larger store (45 minutes away) where there is a bigger selection of shapes and sizes...again all just a dollar or two each! (Though the fuel used to make the drive will cut into the "frugality margin" of the project).

Still a work in progress but I painted the sections I had and so far, I think the result is promising.

Half a fort, and still only 10 dollars spent

I also found a sphere made of the same material as the boxes (or so I thought, ...it turned out to have a soft plastic inner lining, but still easy to cut.) so the dome was a nice addition.



I used a wire nipper to cut the crenellation along the top of the large walls. Since the cardboard is thin this job goes fast. The thin appearance of the parapets is something that I'll have to overlook for the sake of an inexpensive project. Though they could be backed with another layer to thicken them up, for this first go I wanted to keep it extremely simple. In other words, whenever the urge to complicate things crops up, step away from the project and have another Bass until the feeling passes!