From kitbashing to scratchbuilding a couple village houses

This is an ongoing project to build a fantasy-medieval village where all the houses have playable interiors. I started with a plastic kit, the Warhammer/Citadel Laketown House model, and then moved on to a fully scratchbuilt half-timbered house. I was inspired by several similar projects on the Lead Adventurers forum, but very few seemed to go as far as having removable roofs and stories so as to reveal fully playable interiors. My plan is to use these models in roleplaying game sessions (specifically Pathfinder, the successor to D&D 3.5) and I have to admit I’m finding it a far larger project than I first thought.
On to the Laketown house.
Here are the sprues:

Notice the two two-story building facades in the upper left corner. This was my first clue that this model wasn't intended to show off the interior. I couldn't build a detachable second story without whacking each of those pieces in half. So I did - vertically, just under the second floor overhang. It was a very fiddly cut, since I couldn't use my handy steel ruler to guide my hand. But it came out *fairly* straight:

Still, I thought, those smooth interior plastic walls with bulging sections corresponding to the outside windows and doors are not ideal to represent the interior layout, even with a lot of surface work. So I pulled out some cardstock calendars from my bank I'd been saving, measured three times and cut out some interior walls:

Also notice that the two second-story facades are double-sided, so no card was required for those walls. The two sides don't match, allowing those assembling multiple kits to add a little variety, but it does mean that the inside wall (and window) won't match the outside wall. Oh well.

So, prior to assembly, I prepared all the interior walls by scoring them and marking board ends, and also experimented on doing the inside of the second-story window (with mixed success - need to make a better effort next time). Mixing ochre, burnt umber, brown, white and black acrylics I got from a craft store (far cheaper than my usual Foundry paints), I tried to shoot for a heavily weathered interior and exterior, keeping the beams darker for contrast:

Finally, I'm quite happy with the bare interiors on both floors. Plus, as near as I can tell, I'm the first gamer to post online pics of the Lake-town house complete with interior!

I was still in a quandary about how to do the heavily weathered and water-logged wood on the docks and platforms. After my initial attempt, and comparing it to real-life pics, it was far, far too dark to really represent weathered wood. I was fairly happy with the dirty blue on most of the exterior walls, but still couldn’t decide if I should redo all the docks and platforms in pale weathered wood.

The next step was to fill the interior with furniture. I scratchbuilt eight bits of furniture to fill the interior, but decided to leave them mobile so they can be moved or removed as necessary to place figures.

The bookcase, the stairway, the trap door, the large and small beds, the table and the chair were all built out of cardstock (old bank calendars). The stove is an inverted golf tee I found in my yard. The large bed's headpiece is a plastic handle from some pool supplies packaging. The bookcase was the most fiddly, since for the books I cut out dozens of tiny (3x4mm approx.) rectangles from card, then glued them together in groups of 5 or 6 before placing them on the bookshelves. This gave a satisfactorily uneven appearance, as if the books were of different sizes, or just haphazardly shelved. In the foreground of the above picture are all the bits and bobs that were actually included with the laketown house kit. I decided to mount them in groups on standard 25mm washer bases (tarted up to look like boards) rather than glue them to the house or the docks directly - so as to keep things more modular.

Here you can see the bed inside the first-floor interior, with its nice headboard. It's funny, I had stuck that bit of plastic in my pocket meaning to toss it in the trash... was my subconscious already telling me to use it on this project? 

Here you can see the stairs a bit better. Notice the door under the stairs. Gotta have somewhere to keep annoying kids until they're ready to lean wizardry!

Here you can see the bookcase and trap door a little better. I still couldn’t decide if I should paste a flat black sheet of paper under the trap door to simulate the darkened depths below.

Here is the second stage of the house exterior, with an assortment of barrels, baskets and wicker fish traps, as well as a tavern sign cribbed from the internet and printed to the right size to be pasted in place before being doctored a bit (google = "tavern sign").

At this point, I was becoming fairly satisfied with my kitbashing efforts, though there was still so much that could be done, like adding vines on the exterior walls, moss on the roof and a nice stretch of water to place the whole thing on. But I finally decided to leave those possible additions for later, and to move on to a fully scratchbuilt half-timbered house.