Comansion Castle burns?

I was visiting Dupontcastle.com to see how progress was going on their castle and decided to have a look at some of the castles on the site. When I came across Dupont Castle's Kasteel Noz entry, someone had emailed that they thought it had burned along with providing a link to a news video. After watching the video of the fire, it appears that it was Comansion Castle, another California castle. If you watch the video, around 0:38 you'll see the door that matches the one in the DupontCastle.com Comansion Castle post. Hopefully, Comansion will be rebuilt.

As a side note, I've had some folks point to the DupontCastle.com website as a source of castle information. While I certainly appreciate any information whatsoever given by readers, personally I don't want to "leech" off of Mr. Dupont's site. Any castle information posted here I dig up myself by wasting hours on the web searching. This time I've made an exception, I figure an owner-built castle burning was important enough to share via link to DupontCastle.com; but basically, unless the castle owner/builders have a website or someone independently writes or posts about it, I won't write about it here.

Edit: The video has been moved to the Comansion Castle entry on the site.

Interview with Peter Wing of Wings Castle

I was perusing the web again looking for more castles and double checking some of the older castle sites to make sure that they were still there when I happened across something neat.

Rachel Connolly did an excellent short interview with Peter Wing of Wing's Castle at Squgglebooth.com. Here's a direct link to the video, and a link to the squigglebooth site. There are some nice shots of the castle that aren't available online, as well as the reason why the castle exists, which is: "Why not?"

Hope you enjoy the video, I certainly did.

Also, Castle Rogues Manor has a shiny new website; and Darkling Castle (even though it has ceased to appear much like a castle) has some neat construction pictures, and finally the Home Castle Building site has disappeared.

Yet another castle design

Here's another sketchup model, this time a split level. The basement is open to a courtyard and the gatehouse. The "hall" is half below grade to remove some of the imposing height it might have, as well as give that side of the castle a more "homey" feel and provide earth-sheltering. I couldn't add much more detail, otherwise it would've gone over the 10MB 3dwarehouse limit. The gatehouse is the same that I've used in the past, and is slightly modified and smaller. I haven't yet put a garage on the building yet. Oh yeah, the little "+" all over the place are from sketchyFFD; it's a script that allows smooth deformation of surfaces - the ground in this case. Comments, as always, are welcome.

Land ho!

Despite the lack of posting on this site, things are still progressing behind the scenes, albeit slowly. We have settled on looking for a parcel of land in one of the aforementioned areas of New York, well away from New York City. Quite rural, actually. Just what we're looking for. We've contacted a realtor and are making a list of properties that we'd like to have a look at, we'll probably head out that way during the middle of this month or early next month. We've already taken one trip out just to see what it was like and if we'd even consider living there; it's a beautiful area with farmland and small towns, rolling landscape and not too distant mountains.

So at any rate, the idea is to see if we can get 10-20 acres. To be honest, we can't really afford it; (can one ever?) but even so, with the real estate market in the dumps and the interest rates so low, opting not to purchase at this point would be foolish as the land would be completely unaffordable later. I say unaffordable, but land is quite reasonable in the area we are looking, it's just another expense that we don't need. I'd like to think we could plop our big stone house on the land, but it may turn into an investment parcel due to the need to sell our current place first.