Cinderella’s Castle: Guinness World Record

When I built my first project in this Guinness World Record category, a record for Largest House of Freestanding Playing Cards didn’t yet exist. Disney had approached me to build Cinderella’s Castle, and had interest in making it a Guinness Record. So, together with Guinness, we created a new category. This project took about one month, and about 3,000 decks of cards to build. In this case, the cards had been printed to look like Disney park passes. I built the project on Swan Boat Landing at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida, in a specially designed tent. Upon completion, with zero wind blowing, we lifted the tent off with a crane, and there stood my card castle, outdoors, in front of the real Cinderella’s castle. Then we knocked it all down.

I should also mention that amongst the hazards of being housed in a tent, the card house endured the reverberations from a massive nightly fireworks show directly behind it and would lose a few cards each evening. A rogue squirrel also ran into the tent and played havoc in the card house’s archway; he was evicted using noise from a portable radio without further incident. I was also made a major in the Disney parade, and of course rode all the rides.