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Teabox Shoppes

Mmmmmmmm ... tea!

Mmmmmmmm ... herbal tea!

And, at home, we call this "bear tea". This is specifically "sleepy honey bear tea". As opposed to regular "sleepy bear tea" or "bear tea".

But more importantly, this is a box. That is, it is a piece of future wargaming terrain.

In this case, near future.

So I have cut out most of the "bottom" of the building. This lets us pick up and put down the building and have stuff inside. I chose the bottom so that all the other sides would be flat, with no seams. It doesn't matter for the roof, but I did it this way, anyway.

And now I close up the box and tape it shut so it is five solid sides of a rectangular prism. Note that I left a little margin on the bottom. This makes a HUGE difference in the stablilty of the final peice.

Now I have drawn a "window" on the front of the building. The bottom of the window is waist high to my minis, including bases. The top is howevwer tall I felt like.

And now I have cut the top and sides with my X-Acto knife and folded down the window. Down, not up.

Down because I am going to fold the flap in half and back inside the window.

So this bit becomes a table for serving food out the window of the shoppe. You could just cut out the window and add a counter. Again, by doing it this way the table and the shoppe both have much more structural integrity.

Here's the side of one building, with a 3D printed door added.

And another building with a door and two windows (scrap punch out bits from a board game) and a simple sign on top.

And the front view of two teabox shoppes, made in different orientations. The roofs are just bits of corrugated cardboard. I bought a 12"x12" pad of corrugated cardboard from the scrapbooking section of the craft store when it was on sale. Using this stuff is much easier and faster than trying to rip one side of regular two-ply corrugated cardboard.

Two different orientations of the same box. Two different sign styles. Two (slightly) different colour roofs. Two different access (door, window) configurations. You can make so many more variants that look "consistent" since they use the same teabox as a base.

FTR, the left sign says "KA-TU-RU" in katakana (the Japanese phonetic alphabet specifically used for foreign words) and "bento" (lunchbox) in Kanji. I wanted to put something like "yakitori" or another street food on the other one. The kanji for those are very intricate ... I can barely read them, let alone reproduce them reasonably. The building on the right has the kanji "kushi" on it; the word for the skewer upon which such street food is often cooked. So, techincally, the sign says "little pointy bamboo stick", but more idiomatically it says "We cooked something over a fire on a stick, so please come over here and buy some to eat. They are yummy!".