When Martin deCourcy, parishioner of St. John Bosco parish in Woodstock, moved to the Shenandoah Valley, from Philadelphia in 1972, he set to work restoring old homes, barns and mills.

Thirty-three years later he is still renovating and rebuilding old structures, but at a much different scale — on an inch to foot ratio to be exact.

After knee and hip surgeries left deCourcy unable to stand for long periods and unable to continue the work he loved, he took up a hobby of creating miniature models of buildings — some of which he worked on and some from his imagination.

One of deCourcy’s recent creations was a reproduction of the original St. John Catholic Church in Woodstock. DeCourcy’s model of the 107-year-old church includes the smallest details from stained-glass windows, to a stove and piano in the back of the church, the confessional and a priest celebrating Mass facing the tabernacle. While deCourcy made most of the church furnishings by hand, he used miniature statues and a small crucifix, and created the tabernacle out of a doll-house medicine cabinet.

The church took deCourcy about eight weeks to build — the stained-glass windows alone took four days.

DeCourcy has built about 20 miniature buildings, many of them for his grandchildren. He built his granddaughters doll houses and one-room school houses, and gas stations and garages for his grandsons.

"My buddy told me I have too much time on my hands," deCourcy said.

Most of the furnishings in his buildings are handmade. DeCourcy looks at doll-house furniture in catalogues and creates copies based on the photos and dimensions.

Down to the smallest details, deCourcy takes care to make his buildings look like the "real thing." His reproduction of a mill includes a working water wheel and real grains stored in the grain bins. A barn he created was built with boards salvaged from an old barn that was being restored. Most of his buildings are wired for electricity and feature lights and it appears there are fires in the fire places. The blacksmith shop has a flickering red light that resemble the fire is blazing from a blacksmith working the bellows. DeCourcy has even figured out how to make smoke escape the chimney of one of the houses.

Several of his buildings were recently on display at St. John Bosco Church in Woodstock during an ice cream social for auxiliary members of the Legion of Mary.

"He’s very faithful," Grace Maslyn, said about deCourcy. Maslyn is vice president of the Legion and helped organize the display of deCourcy’s works. "I think he’s an inspiration to those of us not so far on in years."