Building Foundations

For a narrow gauge project I'm building a fictitious street scene, set somewhere in the Southwestern United States. The structures will be mostly adobe buildings, with white-washed or painted walls and dirt roads along the tracks.

Most of my structures are removable, to make it easier to replace light bulbs or dust them off. I don't like the look of buildings sitting ON instead of  IN the ground. Therefore I place the finished building on the base where it is supposed to be and draw the outlines around the walls. Then I build foundations following these outlines. The foundations are glued to the baseboard.

Using the outlines of the buildings I glue scale lumber strips (8x8, 10x10 or even 12x12) down to the baseboard.

To save the more expensive scale lumber strips I keep the left-overs from wooden laser kits. There are normally many useful pieces to build the foundations, by cutting them into strips.