In a little room near the castle gates, Roger shows the boiler, saying, "I like it because I couldn't have baseboards or forced-air registers in the look of a castle. This hides it, so it's invisible, plus you don't have the noise of the fans coming on."
Between the insulated stone walls and the hydronic heat, Roger DeClements has evolved his perfect formula for a livable castle. Well, almost perfect…
"In the first castle," he says, "I didn't anticipate the problem with the mold. Which is actually a big thing now. A few years ago it was radon, now it's mold in homes. They make homes so tight that they've locked all this moisture in there, and as soon as moisture gets to a cold surface it condenses. With our new method, with the insulation layer inside the wall, the moisture never has the chance to get near it. So my wife complains this castle is too dry. We have twenty feet of snow piled outside, and she says, 'This is too dry.»
To solve the dry air, he's built a heated swimming pool in the stairwell. There, a waterfall will cascade from the top of a stone newel post. Candles will sit on stone ledges, and the pump and filters will be tucked away in an underwater grotto cave.
Like Jerry Bjorklund, Roger found his wife had some castle ideas of her own. Breaking ground in June of 1999, he'd planned to build the third castle by using a construction boom-much like the tripod of trailer tongues Jerry built-but his wife wouldn't let him cut the trees he'd have to remove to let the boom swing around. So, as with the second castle, Roger carried each stone up by hand.
Now, thanks to his wife, the castle is surrounded by native tamarack trees, cedars and pines and rocky fields of huckleberry bushes. Deer and elk and bear roam the neighborhood. The view goes all the way to the Rocky Mountains and Montana. It's a view Roger's had plenty of time to enjoy.
"I got all the stone up there one stone at a time," he says. "The second castle was built all by hand, carrying the stone over that bridge by wheelbarrow. As we built those double rock walls, we put logs sticking out through the walls on both sides. Then we'd put planks across those. We'd put logs through the walls, then pull them out as we worked our way up. That's actually how they did the old castles. They had a name for them-they called them 'put logs. If you look at old photos of the castles in Europe you see all these holes in the walls. Of course, some were to shoot arrows out of, but the little holes were where they put these logs so then you don't have scaffolding going all the way up the walls. I had no idea that's how they did it."
After removing the scaffolding "put logs," Roger filled most of the small holes with square stones. Some he left open as vents.
In order to keep building all winter, he enclosed his construction platform in a plywood shed to protect himself from the high mountain wind and snow and the fact he was working on a sheer wall that rose five stories above a steep hillside.
"When it was five degrees outside," Roger says, "I kept laying stone all winter."
He and a second man lifted the long, eight-by-eight rough-cut Douglas fir beams-one end at a time-into the beam slots. He studded the inside walls with chunks of semiprecious stone. Amethyst. Citrine. Rose quartz. Green calcite. Clear quartz crystals. He hand-carved decorative patterns in the kitchen cabinets and embedded stained-glass mosaics in the masonry walls. On the second floor, he points out a metal statue on the fireplace mantel.
"See the dragon?" Roger says. "A castle has got to have a dragon."
In the bright mountain light, the narrow stained-glass windows blaze bright as red, blue, and yellow neon. In some windows, the colored glass panels are sealed between the layers of clear double-paned windows. Other windows, the stained glass is the only glass in the frame.
"Some windows," Roger says, "I had to go back to the traditional, where I just had to touch the stained glass. The double-paned I try to stay away from as much as I can. When you look at the moon, you can kind of see a double moon. If I can just use solid glass, you can see the moon the way it is."
Battlements are lined with sharp spires of Columbia River basalt. The ceilings are twelve feet high. All the windows are built into pointed Gothic archways in the stone walls.
"You follow the windows with the stones until you get to the point the stones are going to fall down," Roger explains. "Higher than that, the stones are just propped up by sticks. A bigger window, when I get to the top I actually make a small form to do the peak on. A few sticks will hold some rocks, but it's much faster to use a form. You can stack the stones up, and just pull the form out."
He adds, "If you bump one of the sticks, then… the rocks will start coming down."
From the windows to the stonework to the built-in vacuum cleaner system to the wood shingles on the conical tower roofs, Roger DeClements did it all. He wrote his name and the date on the trusses inside the roof. And he followed the ancient mason's tradition of sealing his chisel and trowel inside the walls when he was done laying stone. But by accident. The tools actually fell between the two layers of stone and he buried them with the concrete he poured to fill the space in the permanent form.
Still, despite all this work, Castle Kataryna isn't quite done. There's still the drawbridge to build. Another twenty pallets-thirty-two tons-of stone will soon be delivered by a Canadian quarry. With enough money, Roger plans to build a "great hall" farther uphill, behind the current castle, then connect the two buildings with battlement walls that will enclose a courtyard similar to Jerry Bjorklund's castle plan.
Beyond that, Roger DeClements is already looking for new land for a fourth castle. He wants to learn ironworking, and build a medieval village around his next project.
"The first three were mostly just castle keeps," he says, "where the king and queen would live. I haven't been able to build the big courtyard walls and the big entrance towers and gates to make a castle twenty thousand square feet. The next time, I want to have a big great hall with timbers like a cathedral. And courtyard walls going around. I've got the plans in my head and a little bit down on paper."
He adds, "We looked on the Oregon coast and it was out of our budget."
And Roger DeClements isn't the only person looking to build his dream castle. Since posting a website for Castle Kataryna on the Internet, he's become the nation's guru for private castle projects. People from every state have contacted him for advice about how to build their own fantasy projects.
"With the Web," he says, "I'm getting all these people contacting me. I never realized there were so many people with the passion for castles. They love them. Lots of people say, 'It's been my dream for years to build a castle. And it's not just men, it's the women, too, who have this same dream."
As the point man for the new American castle movement, he says, "The attraction is a love of the romantic era of castles people envision. The better life they picture back then. There's a whole group called the SCA [Society for Creative Anachronism] that like to create the medieval times as they thought they should've been. Not as they were, but as they picture these times in their minds, their fantasies. Also, the movies and the Disney castles have inspired people to want castles, too."
As a practical building contractor, he says, "Besides, the lifespan of so many houses is getting smaller and smaller with the new materials being invented."
Now people from Alaska to Florida are learning from his mistakes.
"When I originally put this castle on the Internet, on a website, I was flooded with orders to build castles all over the United States. There are very few people who have the patience and the time to stack all that stone. And have the knowledge to do it right.
