Time for a Bath, Anyone?

 

A Roman Bath with a black and white tile floor. The two building wings are 
not attached to the floor for ease of packing for travel.

Click on the pictures to enlarge

Earlier this week I commenced work on a Roman Bath for my Roman town/city and it is nearly finished today, save for a little bit of touch up painting and gluing the columns into place.

The model had to fit into an area measuring 16" long by 12" high as this is the size of the cork placemat that will serve as the base for the model. The only problem is that the Roman Bath model would not fit into one of my cardboard carrying boxes (purchased from Uline). So I came up with the idea of making the components of the bath free-standing so that they would fit into a smaller container. Then when I am ready to set up the model on the game table, then I lay the 16x12 cork placemat on the table and place the two sections of the bath on top of the placemat. The actual bath and other accoutrements are added as needed.

The bath has two separate "wings" of the building that flank the center bathing pool. The wings are removable. I use my usual black foam core board as my basic building material and pieces of bass wood to make the roof trusses. The terra cotta roof tiles come in a plastic sheet made by Plastruct. I bought my tiles online and they arrived within two days of placing the order.

The joins where two pieces of foam core board meet are taped over with masking tape to hide the join lines (see below). The plastic columns are from a wedding cake tier set that I found on Amazon. The black and white floor tile is a decorative paper that I found at Michael's Stores.

This morning I glued the roof onto the structure using a hot glue gun. One of the roof panels was glued upside down, but this error is barely noticeable given the size of the individual tiles on the tile sheets. Take care to line everything up before hand so that once the hot glue is spread over the roof frame you end up with the exact amount of roof overhang that you want. On one of the panels, my overhang on the left was one rank of tiles whilst the right rank of tiles was three tiles wide. I had to tear off the piece of tile before the glue set in and do it all over again. Then I tried it again, but this time the overhang was even on both sides, but I had glued the tile sheet upside down. Doh!!!!

Eventually I got it right, as seen in the pictures below. Then I applied a coat of linen grey chalk paint over the walls of the buildings. This is to hide the color of the black foam core board. After the grey color dries, I apply a coat of antique white chalk paint for the final color. A border of terra cotta red will be applied around the base of the buildings.

The following pictures show the model after the first base coat of chalk paint has been applied and after the roof tiles are attached. The two columns shown in the front are part of a set of four columns that will be attached to the building sections, two columns per building. I drilled two holes into each column so that I can pin it to the building wall so that the columns do not fall off of the model during handling or travel.

So here are some pictures of the almost finished Roman Bath House:

Is it a public Roman Bath or is it Messalina's House of Fun?

We had better close the drapes and not find out.

The bathing pool in better times. A tribune is consoled with vino,
served by one of the servants at the bath house. A senator appears to 
be negotiating for something that he shouldn't be doing.

The Roman City Continues to Grow

I have now built 15 buildings and six feet of Roman aqueducts since the beginning of February 2025 and I have been rather amazed to see how this project has grown from a village to a larger town and now into a city with each new addition.

The new Roman Bath is located in the lower right corner.

I added a narrow side street that runs parallel to the forum square.

The dock area is a "what if" type of set up just so that I could see what it might
look like. I won't have enough room in my vehicle to take the docklands to Historicon.

The view of the city looking from the Triumphal Arch towards the Temple of Athena.
The new bath house is located in the upper left corner to the left of the temple.

Another view of the town from the same point of view as the previous picture.

And finally, nearly all of the civilian figures that populate this Roman city are 1/30 scale (60mm) figures from King & Country of Hong Kong. Some of KC's new civilian releases arrived the other day and now I have over 80 civilians roaming around the streets of my city. The population is certainly growing!

ccc