City in a box

 Ages ago, when I was still regularly playing 40K, I wanted to build a ruined city. I was as pressed for hobby storage space back then as I am today. So I had bought a box and planned the buildings to be modular in such a way that the entire city would fit in the box.

I remember taking a lot of w.i.p. pictures, but I could find only one in my digital archive:

After a recent game with my son (look here for pictures of the city in a game) I remembered to take some new pictures for this post.

The city consists of 3 big buildings and 3 small buildings/ruins, a few walls and rubble piles and some burnt out cars and other obstacles. It fits on a 6x4 table (several open spaces) or on a 4x4 table (less open space). The box is 44x37x37 cm (17,5x14,5x14,5 inches).

All large buildings were constructed using polystyrene for the walls and MDF for the base and the floors. The walls are not fixed to the base but are all corner-pieces so they can stand without toppling over.

A sheet of polystyrene was added to some of the bases to provide some depth for bomb craters.

The floors have toothpics glued underneath which fit into small plastic straw pieces glued into the walls (see picture). This allows more weight (minis) to be put on the floors and provides some protection against wear and tear.

An example of one of the smaller buildings. For the other ones I only built the base and used plastic ruins (cornerpieces) for the walls. 

The "bricks" are pieces of sprue frame.

The city inside the box:

Note: I found out the hard way that it pays to take a few pictures at several stages while fitting the city inside the box. It is a tight fit so there only a few ways it will all actually fit. The pictures greatly speed up the process of storing the city after a game!