"Furring the walls out with insulation," Roger says, "that doesn't work well. The cold goes right through the concrete. It gets right to where the insulation is. Then the warm inside air filters through the insulation and contacts the cold surface of the concrete or blocks. Then the water will condense. As soon as one water molecule condenses, another one is there to take its place. So you get this continuous condensation on the cold wall behind the insulation. That's a problem, because it will cause mold to grow, and it smells like a basement."
In order to go back to college and study for a graduate degree, Roger sold that castle to artists to use as a studio. "Before I built my second castle, I went back to college and learned a lot," he says. "I was a contractor from 75 until about 87, building homes and commercial buildings, using the traditional methods. Going to college, I learned a lot more about the physical process of what's going on with heat transfer and moisture."
He says, "So for the second castle we built, we went to real stone."
That second castle stands on a rock above a waterfall in Sedro-Woolley, Washington. It's perched on a stone precipice, high above a nature pool where local kids swim all summer. Instead of electric heat, the second castle was heated with a wood stove.
He says, "The second one we designed to look like a castle, and you couldn't tell when it was built. We used all stone and incorporated a new construction method, too, starting with a double-wall castle where you go from rock on the outside, then a layer of rigid, extruded polystyrene, then reinforced concrete, and then you'd go back to stone again, so you couldn't see the concrete or insulation on the inside. All you could see is the stone."
Step-by-step, Roger explains: "The first thing to go up is the rebar grid, then the insulation boards. Then we run the conduit and plumbing, high-speed Internet, whatever you want. Then you build a double rock wall, on the inside and the outside. After you get up about eight feet, you fill it with concrete. Then you do it over again. The two rock walls, which are held together by stainless-steel rods, form a permanent concrete form. It's just like the Romans did a long time ago. They did the same thing. They didn't use metal ties, they used extra-long rocks to tie the two rock walls together.
"We try to find a quarry, where the stones come out rectangular-shaped, ashlar stones, so we're not trying to stack a whole bunch of round stones. It can be done with river rock, but it will take a lot more time, and it won't be quite as strong."
Instead of five acres, the second castle sits on twenty. Instead of five weeks, this castle took Roger from 1992 to 1995 to build.
"The second castle couldn't be seen from the road like the first one could," he says. "It was a little more remote. I got a good deal on the land because the only way to get there was you had to cross this hundred-foot-deep gorge. So I built a metal bridge, then all the materials were hauled over in a wheelbarrow. Sometimes I go back there and I can't believe what I'd done."
Still, Roger DeClements says he loves the work. "A lot of people will come up and say, 'Oh, I can't believe this. I could never do this. To me, it's basically clear and simple. It's very relaxing to do it. It's very peaceful and relaxing to be out there in the fresh air with the trees and the hills… stacking stones."
It's interesting to note here, Carl Jung began to explore his subconscious by playing a building game with stones. Like a puzzle. Putting them together, he felt he was plunged into outer space, where he had visions that would shape the rest of his life.
"It's like doing a jigsaw puzzle," Roger DeClements says. "Getting all the pieces together. But it doesn't strain you or keep your mind going a mile a minute. And then you can get creative, because you can make curves and towers and different shapes with it."
And living in a castle?
"It feels different to live in a castle instead of a house," he says. "It's quiet. It doesn't shake in the wind. The temperature doesn't go up and down with the outside temperature. The stone holds it constant." He adds, "I haven't been able to make the transition to a medieval knight or something. I'm still the same person."
That castle was forty-five feet tall, with arched windows and four thousand square feet of living space on three floors. Still, when it came time to sell and move on, the first two realtors balked. They said there were no comparable sales in the area. Subsequent realtors said not to worry, and they immediately had three full-price offers and sold that castle in 1995 for $425,000.
The search was on for new "castle land." They looked in Utah, but land was too expensive or no water was available. "We went from Logan, we went up to Jackson, to Targee, Sun Valley, and up into Montana to Big Sky, then to over here, and this just beat them all by a mile."
Now, here they are in Bonner County, Idaho, high in the Schweitzer Mountain ski resort.
"You can do plans ahead of time or you can just build," Roger says. "It depends on where you build. Different locations, different cities, different counties have different permit requirements. Some of them can take a couple years to give a permit. Some of them can take ten minutes. That's one reason we like Idaho. They're permit-friendly."
He says, "If you're searching for castle land, I tell a lot of people to go to the county planning department first and ask them. A lot of people will think: 'I want an eighty-foot-tall tower… So they need to check if the county has a thirty-five-foot height restriction, or any architectural requirements."
The Idaho castle, Roger named Castle Kataryna for his daughter, who was born here. It has a winding staircase inside, walnut woodwork, and pointed Gothic doors and windows, many of them stained-glass.
Touring the castle, Roger points out the walnut window frames he made. "In the second castle," he says, "the windows were put in after the walls were built. In this third castle, the windows actually went in right after the rebar and insulation, before the rock goes up around them. That gave us a lot more authentic look and finish. In the second castle, we had to try to cut the boards to fit, then caulk around them. In the third castle, the windows went in first, wrapped in plastic to protect them, stone was built around them, we attached the window frames only to the outside rock layer, which can move and expand. The inside stone layer stays seventy-two degrees, and the outside can go from zero to a hundred, so it gets bigger and smaller. This way the windows will move with the outside. We attach them to the outside because that's where we want to seal them from the weather."
Another improvement with this latest castle is the «hydronic» heating system, where a boiler heats water that runs through piping under the floors. It's even, quiet heat, and the castle's thermal mass of stone will stay warm for three days after the heat is turned off.
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.»