Free Bates House

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Paper Building Kits

Bates House is One Creepy Paper Kit

Ray Kleim, of Haunted Dimensions, has released his excellent Bates House paper kit. Brave souls that build it will be rewarded with a handsome, albeit creepy, replica of the Bates House from the Hitchcock movie Psycho. If you’ve seen the film, you know that Anthony Perkins plays a rather off-his-nut motel manager that lives with his deceased mother in a creepy house on a hill behind the motel.

If you look carefully at Kleim’s Bates House you can see poor Mother Bates propped in one of the windows. It is eerie.

This free paper kit for download is exquisitely detailed with stained, worn walls, eerily luminescent curtains in some of the windows, and really beautifully crafted woodwork. The Bates House appears to be of a Second Empire design, with a mansard roof and railings around the top to form a widow’s walk. The massive porch is completely surrounded by weathered, stained woodwork and surrounds the massive tower that dominates the front of the house.

Instructions for the kit are included in the 11 page free PDF and feature clear and complete illustrations to guide you through the project. Best of all, there are several photographs of a completed model to show you how it should look.

This kit features several innovations that will help you produce an accurate model. First is an optional second set of windows that are designed to add depth to the walls. You know, of course, that a paper building is merely a 2D drawing folded to become 3D. These window inserts go a long way towards perpetuating the illusion of dimensionality.

Another innovation that should prove useful is a second set of wrought iron railings that is designed to be printed on transparent plastic instead of paper. Printing the image onto a transparency will save you roughly a gazillion hours and six tons of frustration in carefully and tediously cutting out the tiny spaces between the rails and uprights of the tiny iron work. Now, finding a printer that will print a lasting impression on plastic, that might take a bit of doing.

Although no scale is given, the Bates House appears to be drawn to ¼ inch scale, making it absolutely perfect for O Gauge model railroad layouts. HO Scalers will want to reduce the image by 55% for their layouts.

Congratulations to Ray Keim on a beautiful model. You can find the link at Ray Keim’s Haunted Dimensions.

Photo: Haunted Dimensions.com