In December of 2008 I was invited to be on Karen Oakley’s decorative painting team. She is the owner and principal of Faux Real Decorative Painting in Mystic CT. That’s all I thought I was doing but then as fate would have it she gave my card to the show designers and they asked me to do the mosaic in the kitchen for the stove backsplash. Thanks Karen.

This was a HUGE undertaking by literally thousands of community members. There were about 2000 of us just in the trades including the cement/foundation, excavators, carpenters, roofers, plumbing, electric, painting, tilers…you know, the whole ball of wax. There were equally as many on the volunteer end doing everything and anything else the trades people were not doing. All the materials for the house and the contents were donated by the sponsors, the time was donated by community members and the project took a week to build. At any given time of day there were literally hundreds of people on the site working to stay on deadline.

The Castle

From L to R, Deb Aldo, Karen Oakley, Dee Pierson, Steve Pierson on December 6th at 7:30 am, it was 16 degrees outside.	We got to watch as they demolished the house. It was fun to watch it go and make room for the new one.
(BURP) The Excavator needs to take a break from eating the house, the crew left to walk off their very large lunch. After lunch the house was removed and the excavation for the foundation started in earnest.	This was a few days later, the foundation was ready and the house had been framed, the plastic was so that the masonry exterior could cure properly.
This shot was taken at 11 pm on the third day of the build. The place looked like this with a sea of people for all the time the build was occurring.
The shot of the mosaic was taken hours before the Girard’s came back. They are cleaning like mad to get the place ready. The cabinets were stocked with food, the bathrooms had tooth paste and soap in them!	This was one of three very large stencils on the ceiling and was done two days before the house was completed. We were on 10’ foot scaffolding, the ceilings in this room are 16’ high.
Taken on Move that BUS!! Day at 1pm it was cold and rainy but the Castle was a bright light in the day.