I was inspired by Hand Made Bagend to create my own fantastic and pretty Hobbit Hole! From The Hobbit, by J.R.R. Tolkien, you know, right?

Um... as you can see, it didn't turn out too well, though. I improvised. A lot. Like, a lot.

You can follow my extremely simple and amateurish procedure to create any type of easy messy sticky ruined building!

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A few... okay, most... of the pictures in this Instructable are upside down or sideways. I'll fix them later. Well, probably.

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List of Materials & Improvisation Suggestions:

pen/pencil/markers
wood dowels, skewers, rolled up newspapers, tree branches, pencils
flour & water, clay
food coloring, ink from pens/markers (optional)
bowls
tape
pretty paper, paper + crayon scribbles (optional)
popsicle sticks (optional)
hair dryer
Kleenex, toilet paper/paper towels
baking pan + wax paper, flat tray or surface
oven
paper
plastic insulation stuff, cardboard, styrofoam, thick paper, thin paper stack taped together
white school glue
hot glue gun & refills, super glue, lots of school glue, lots and lots of tape
scissors
garden shears, big scissors, wire cutters, normal scissors
X-ACTO knife, scissors

Warnings:

Be careful when cutting stuff with improvised shears/scissors.

Beware of splinters and pointy things.

Use caution when hot-gluing stuff.

Step 1: Planning a Pretty Design

Get a big sheet of paper, or just tape a couple papers together. Same thing.

Draw the outline of the floor plan. For me, just a big rectangle. Make it the same scale as your building.

Use a ruler to mark increments along the sides of your outline. 1 inch, 2 inch, 3 inch, 4...

Think about how tall (and awesome) your building will be. Draw a sketch of how it will look from the front/back/sides.

Mark increments on your sketches for both width and height.

Think about how many posts or columns you'll use for each side of the building and approximate the length of each post.

Step 2: Creating a Frame

Using your approximations, cut your dowels/sticks/whatever.

Hot-glue your sticks to a single stick-base-thingy.

Step 3: More Frame Stuff

Do the same thing for all sides of your building.

(Sketch side, measure posts, cut dowels, glue dowels.)

Glue all 4 sides together.

Add little triangle reinforcement things with dowel stubs to the corners of your building if you want.

Then, add the roof. Hot-glue dowels on top of the posts.

Reinforce the base of the building. Hot-glue longer dowels to the base, then use shorter dowels to reinforce the longer ones.

Feel proud of yourself! It looks so pretty!

Step 4: Mistake #1: Flooring

Flooring! Like cement, right?

Mix some salt dough clay. A couple cups of flour, a couple cups of water, some salt... don't bother reading the recipe entirely. Just move your building frame onto a baking pan with wax paper. Dump your gooey mixture onto the pan. It'll turn out well (enough), don't worry.

Unfortunately you've forgotten that you won't be able to bake your model. Wood is flammable, after all. And so the flooring will forever stay depressingly squishy...

Improvise something better for this step, and you'll have a much more lightweight and only half-messed up building.

Step 5: Front and Back

Take your plastic insulation stuff, hold it up to a side of your house. Trace the outline. Cut it out.

Trace doors and windows.

Cut out doors and windows.

Realize that your doors have post thingies behind them. Oops. Well, you can trim them off later.

Step 6: Inner Wall Posts

Floor plan!

Make your original outline thing more pretty. Draw rooms and stuff. Put dots for posts.

Make educated guesses on how high each post should be, or do a bit of math.

Unfortunately you've already put your flooring in. Just smash the posts into the wet soggy clay. Hot-glue the tops of the posts to the roof dowel things, too.