World War Two in Scale: A Modeler's Journey

Here's what's happening right now:
I found this awesome map of the 506/501 attack movements into Carentan. I noticed that Band of Brothers isn't that far off, but it's also not all that accurate. I've tried looking for more info, and have been able to find that the road in which E Co came in (what I am depicting in my dio) was not a T, but a Y axis. This is really good for two reasons:
1. This will make the dio layout much more appealing and aesethic and,
2. It just would make more sense to play off the maps I've seen than go straight off a TV show. They did a great job on the battle itself. And also, the Cafe wasn't actually the Cafe in real life, during the attack. There was no "Cafe De Normandie", actually, but I really love that idea and I think it tells 2 stories on its own, just by being a Cafe in which the Americans are getting beat down by the Germans.

Also found out it was Fallshirmjager 6th regiment, and they had a mortar team. The americans getting into Carnentan took a ton of casualities. The 501st was originally supposed to be the ones securing and taking the town, but during the early part of June, while they were making their way across the causeways into the area, they took a lot of damage and had a lot of causalities, so the 506th/101st AB was tasked with the job of securing Carentan instead.
So, here we are now with a final layout. This is just tracing paper (I'm an Urban Planning student) with the layout...note, the buildings are mostly to scale, might get shifted a bit here and there, but the roads are probably a little off.

Here's the map I'm using:

And here's the Y axis, more clearly, in blue

Here's the layout, finally!!

The first one is a draft, to the map, before I knew what size base I'd need

Next, we have a layout with the cafe on it for sizing/scale

The same thing, only now on an 18x20 poster frame (got it with a 50% coupon, yay!!)

I started work on the hard wood floors for the cafe. Balsa wood is best, but I ran out and had to use basswood, which meant I had to sand the floors once they were glued down to make sure they were even. I used the same Artists' Watercolor paper (the thicker stuff), cut down with a blade to size of the floors and laid it on the joists I installed for the ceiling/floors.

The best glue in the world, behind it in the smaller white bottle is the same stuff, but a "quick tack" version of it, which I adore

The floor laid out before sanding...this is an older building that was heavily used, at least in my dio story, by the germans as they secured the town. So the laying of the boards is a little off to show wear and tear.

Next, I just thinned out some white acrylic paint, the cheaper nice stuff, not the fancy stuff I'll be using later

Then, I mixed some colors and dry brushed to a tone I liked

And finally, washed it all with a reddish/orange/brown color I mixed together for the final effect.

Thanks for reading!