Addams Family Spooky Mansion Cardboard Model - With Lights and Sound!
Introduction: Addams Family Spooky Mansion Cardboard Model - With Lights and Sound!
My inspiration for this model was the 1991 Addams Family movie house. The set designers drew their inspiration from <PERSON> original Addams Family cartoons, bringing the mansion to life in all its imposing and slightly derelict glory. To me it is iconic.
This model is made mostly from cardboard boxes and hot glue and decorated with acrylic paints. The lighting and sound effects are supplied by an Arduino-compatiable chip, programmable LEDs, and a small speaker.
Supplies
For the model: corrugated cardboard, cereal boxes, paper, hot glue, Tacky Glue, PVA glue, acrylic paint, Mod-Podge, spray primer, milk cartons, laser butter (optional), XPS foam, Woodland Scenics ground cover supplies, sticks.
For the lights and sound: individually addressable RGB LEDs (we used a strip of WS2801 RGB LEDs), DFRobot mini MP3 player, SD Card, ESP-12F wifi-enabled arduino-compatible module, 5v/3v charging module, 18650 batteries.
Step 1: Hoard Cardboard Boxes
I'll start off by saying that this build took way more cardboard than I had expected. Not so much the structural, corrugated kind, but the cereal boxes I used for details. We were eating a lot of cereal in our house for a few weeks to make sure we had enough. I also used kitchen roll tubes, milk cartons (for the window panes), and a few other bits and bobs from the craft kit.
Step 2: Start Building the Structure
I did this totally by eye with no measurements whatsoever, but you may want to be a little more precise. If so, this 3D model by finfito is a great resource, and much easier to use than scanning through the movie on Netflix. But I did that as well because it's a great movie.
I started cutting wall shapes from the corrugated boxes and hot glueing them together to form the main structure. 997
For my model, I wanted it to have quirky angles rather than be straight, so I went a bit nutty with the shapes.
Cutting the windows out was far easier with the walls in place than flat on a cutting mat, so I recommend that. The curved mansard roof was a little bit of a nightmare. I cut a bunch of supports with a curve in them, glued them along the top, and then laid over some thin cardstock in the nice curve you see in the images. Trimming the corners accurately was also a nightmare, but this area will be covered with shingles later, so it didn't have to be perfect.
The small curved roof areas over the bay windows and conservatory were sections of kitchen roll tubes, which was a lot easier to do!
I only made three sides of the house. This is partly because you never see the back of the house in the movie, and the jury seems to be out on how that is laid out, but also partly because I wanted to leave the back as an access panel for the electronics inside.
Step 3: Adding the Details
Once you have your basic shape, it's time to start on the weatherboard cladding, roofing, and other details.
For the weatherboards, I cut cereal boxes into strips about 1.5 cm wide and then hot glued them to the walls, starting at the bottom, and overlapping them by a few mm. It's a long process but satisfying to slowly cover the random mix of colours and branding of the structural card, plus it has the great benefit of covering up nasty edges. Cut the boards to the width needed, and don't worry about the small gaps at corners - once the walls are all covered with boards, you can hide the corners with trim. I cut 4 mm strips of card and tacky glued them along the corner edges, holding them in place for a few seconds to ensure a nice clean edge.
For areas where the corrugated card would still show (i.e. along the roof edges), I cut more 4 mm strips of cereal boxes, and carefully glued them along the ugly corrugated edges with tacky glue.
The two most complicated details of the house are the roof windows and the front door entryway. For the windows, I constructed little roofs and pillars out of some thicker card I had in my box graveyard, then cut into the curved roof where they needed to be, and glued them in place.
For the entryway, I build the steps with the corrugated card, edged with more 4 mm strips, and built up the stone wall in the same way. 959