Cool Kit Building Projects for Beginners: From Model Airplanes to Cars & Houses

Everybody should have a hobby. One with variable levels of difficulty is ideal: you can begin it easily, but it will continue providing exciting challenges when you have learned the necessary skills. Kit building is an activity that covers a huge range of endeavors, from model cars to real cars, from dollhouses to full-size houses, and also taking in complicated items such as musical instruments and entire model villages.

Maybe you have a long-standing hobby but are considering others, perhaps you took one up during lockdowns — fun home activities made those times more tolerable — or you simply have more spare time these days. Either way, kit building is so varied in range and is so easy to start that it could be the exciting new activity you need right now. We suggest a top dozen types of kit to build, whether you glue things on your kitchen table or nail wood in your garage — we also explain how you then can look after your finished products. Some kits contain all the necessary parts and more, while others require you to tool up. Now you just need to dream, and to start building.

#1 Homes: Building from a Kit Saves You Money & Time

Kit houses were popular in the early decades of the 20^th century — check out the 1920 Buster Keaton film “One Week” about building a house from a kit…. badly! The concept is still alive, but mainly for smaller, wooden houses and cabins, with sizes ranging from ‘tiny homes’ just big enough to sleep in to structures larger than 2,000 square feet. This way, you could save not only money but also the considerable trouble of calculating all the dimensions and quantities of the materials needed for your home.

Assembling a tiny house from a kit

#2 Cars: Your Kit-Built Coupé Will Impress Twice Over!

You’ve built your home and, as an American, you will now want a car! Kit cars go back a long way but started becoming popular in the 1950s. A kit from the Caterham company, for example, gives you all the parts you need to build a sports car — and it could cost tens of thousands of dollars — while other car kits are often much less complete. Manufacturers often say it will take months to build a car from their kits, but when at the wheel you will sound doubly impressive by being able to say: “I made this!”

Kit-built sports car

#3 Garages: Kit-Build a Strong Steel Structure for Your New Car

Your kit car was built with love, so put it under a roof. A traditional garage takes a while to construct, and professional bricklayers are in high demand these days, so kit-build again. The main material will probably be ridged steel in bolt-together sections. You could put up a regular one-car garage or one large enough for several vehicles, including RVs, and more besides, like tools and sports gear. There are also kits for building open-sided carports. Suppliers may be able to install it on delivery, but that’s no fun.

Garage with metal siding & roof

#4 Boats: Building from a Kit Takes Your Carpentry Skills Higher

Maybe you have access to water nearby, or perhaps just a passion for fishing that refuses to go away! Boats can be expensive, but you can save money and have some fun in your garage by building one from a kit. You might start with a stand-up paddleboard and work up to a kayak before you try a rowing boat that will hold you, a friend, and all your rods and tackle. In the process, you will improve your woodworking skills and get to know more about glue than you ever knew you wanted to — tight lines!

#5 Sheds: Obvious Kit Candidates, and You Can Build Some Furniture Too

If you have a garden, a shed could be the ideal kit. It’s not something you can easily take home from a shop, it involves pleasant-to-handle materials such as wood, and the finished article serves many useful functions. Sizes range from simple boxes that accommodate a few tools to some very fancy constructions with windows and Dutch doors, while at the top end they can be large utility buildings. Outdoor furniture such as wooden chairs, tables and benches can also be built from kits, as can garden items like pergolas.

Timber garden shed construction

#6 Playhouses, Forts & Dens: Kits Encourage Kids’ Enthusiasms

Kids who enjoy playing soldiers usually need a fort. A set of ‘blaster boards’ lets them reenact battles with their nerf guns. Indoors, consider getting them a kit that gives maximum flexibility by using rods or blocks so it can grow along with their imaginations. Many dollhouses are built from kits, so kids can choose the exact one they want and maybe have fun building it too. Then there are dens — either in the forest or in the corner of a bedroom — where children learn self-reliance, and kits for them may include ropes, sheets, tent pegs, utensils…. and camouflage.

#7 Electronics: Geeks Have Supplied and Built Kits from the Start

Electronics tends to attract geeks, who are willing and able to build things from scratch, and enterprising ones among them then started issuing kits so even more people could join in the fun. Amateur radio equipment, television sets computers and scientific apparatus have all been issued in kit form — the Heathkit company often led the way with this, having previously pioneered constructing aircraft at home from kits. In the 21^st century, robot-building kits are now available.

#8 Musical Instruments: Kit Build the Earliest and the Eeriest!

Continuing the electronics theme, small electric organs have been issued in kit form. But the instrument most often built from a kit is surely the highly unusual theremin, invented in the 1920s, which makes its eerie sounds — most often heard in films needing a spooky effect — as the player’s hands move in the air around it. Other specialist instruments have also been sold as kits, including a wide range of types used predominantly for “Early music,” such as the hurdy gurdy, the psaltery, the hammered dulcimer and the lyre.

Playing a theremin

#9 Figurines: Build Your Own Godzilla or a ‘Mecha’ Robot

Model human figures don’t seem an obvious candidate for kit building. However, Japan has the tradition of ‘garage kits’ — they are nothing to do with garages except that you might build them in one! Anime and ‘Kaiju‘ characters are popular subjects there, while in America they could be movie monsters — Godzilla would suit both groups! — and robots also feature strongly. Complex kits might have more than a hundred parts, usually made from polyurethane resin, which gives them their alternative name ‘resin kits.’

Resin model robots

#10 A Model Airplane Kit Is Not Just for Christmas…

Remember those kits for scale-model plastic airplanes and cars we got as kids? Many adults never stopped and took the passion to an even higher level! They often specialize in one single area, perhaps high-performance cars or airplanes from a certain era, and some switch to wood, perhaps customizing the models to make a range of variations. The results can be an array of beautiful machines to hang from the ceiling or to put on a shelf, not to mention a greater appreciation of history and engineering practices.

F51 Mustang plastic scale model

#11 Sometimes It Takes a Village!

Maybe you enjoy building scale models from kits but don’t really need the (imaginary) adrenalin rush of flying a P-51 Mustang or driving a Shelby Mustang — for something cozier, create your own quaint village, maybe in New England or Ye Olde England! To start simply, you could rebuild Thoreau’s Walden Pond cabin, then think about mansions, windmills and lighthouses. Some suppliers offer plans you simply download, print out and then construct using that paper — this can be a great advantage as you just start again if the kids wreck everything first time!

Scale miniature model of a village street

#12 Kit-Build Like It’s Never Been Built Before!

Some kits are of course more free form, with LEGO perhaps being the best known. Meccano has been supplying small, bolt-able metal parts for model-making since 1898, and it has even been used to construct serious industrial prototypes, mechanical computers and sculptures. There are wheels and cogs aplenty and you can also add motors. The manufacturers offer ideas about what you can build, but basically it’s up to you, so why not try to build the world’s next great invention!

Any kit-built item, if it cannot be deconstructed and built into something else, needs a place to live — assuming you built it right. Hopefully your new garage, shed and car are already in use. Collections of other items, however, begin to take up a lot of space — and acquire a lot of dust. Consider renting some extra storage space. A 5’x5’ self storage unit could house all your new scale-model airplanes, figurines and attempts at electronics. If your village grew — and, after all that work, you will surely want to keep it — you might need a 5’x10’ storage unit. For delicate collectibles made of cloth or paper, for example, renting climate-controlled storage is advisable.

Kit-building is clearly so much broader than plastic airplanes. And it can even go professional: In ‘kitbashing,’ models are made using pieces from more than one different kit, perhaps to create manufacturing prototypes and movie special effects models. Somebody has to create the next Star Wars space vehicles… so, happy kit building!