Dog Days

Summer isn't exactly my favorite time of year.  I'm more of a spring and fall kind of guy, I'll even take the brutal depths of winter over the sweltering heat of summer.  The good news is that after 8 (or more) hours worth of full-force nature at work, I'm drawn to the cool dry air of the basement even more, inspiring me to move forward on my layout journey. 

Room panorama (quick and dirty) showing wall paint applied.  Valance

supports are being installed now - visible hanging from ceiling at top right.

Between the busy work schedule, and the peril-fraught journey of raising children, I've managed to make some more progress since the last post.  My track plan is essentially finalized.  This allowed me to nail down the height of my benchwork, which in some cases will be multi-decked.  Once I reached this point, it seemed like a logical step to get my wall colors applied since I was able to create a demarcation line between sky and room wall color.  

Finalizing the track plan, and subsequently the benchwork depth allowed me to also determine the location of my valance.  This will be the last tedious step before I can finally move on to the benchwork, and as I've mentioned in my previous post - that will be the stage where it finally starts to feel like a hobby.  This is pretty much uncharted territory for me.  I had layouts (maybe "train set" is more appropriate) as a kid, but years of inspiration and observation are now culminating in my own vision coming to life, it's a very exciting thing.  I would hope to encourage anyone else out there who feels overwhelmed by the beginning stages to press on, as progress begets progress - this coming from a Major League Procrastinator!

Sometime soon, I hope to create a decent track-plan to share.  Up until this point I've pretty much been using the old-school graph paper method.  I'll also try to explain my valance construction method in detail.