If a man's loam is his castle, it'd better be fit for a king

What sort of summer house could you build in a day? Give me a paper cup and a spoon, and I'll show you.

It should have solidly packed, thick walls topped by towers with turrets for the lookout guards. It needs a great room and as many other chambers as possible.

Make it big enough for a dungeon, grand enough for a moat and a drawbridge around the wall surrounding it.

When it's done, decorate it with seashells and kelp, and call it your castle.

Mind you, it's OK to build a basic subdivision-type sand castle, like we did when we were kids. If you're building to impress, however, you'll want to plan an elaborate layout, an estate that's perhaps on its own little Lake Washington you dig yourself.

How impressive is impressive? We're talking about lights at the windows and real fire in the fireplaces, thanks to battery-powered holiday lights and buried propane hoses.

Impressive calls for sculptures, tunnels and brick-like roads.

Catch a contest

Don't believe it? Check out a sand-castle contest. We're well into the hot castle-contest season, with contests in Port Angeles, Long Beach and Spokane last month; Olympia this month; and Bellingham in September, among others.

Seeing a contest made me a believer. In a few hours, teams put together massive castles with cypress trees leading up winding roads to them, mermaids and sea creatures with sculpted scales, a mighty Poseidon with a seaweed beard.

A few hours more, and the tide reclaimed all the sand, making it part of the beach again — ready for the next day's builders.

This is so much better than burying Dad up to his neck and drawing a bikini in the sand on top of him.

Crafting your castle

But how do you make trees and scales that won't crumble? How do you do special effects, like making a sand dragon breathe fire?

For help, the Web waits.

Web site: www.sandtools.com, Can You Dig It Sand Tools, Staten Island, N.Y.

Purpose: Aside from selling buckets, brushes and special shaping tools made of ABS, the site shows and tells how to dazzle onlookers with ordinary sand.

Ease of navigation: Use the navigation bar at the top of the page to get where you want to go.

What you'll find: The navigation buttons lead to long inside pages, most of them rich with photos. The tone is befittingly light, and the material covers castle-building from the beach up. Highlights include construction tips, an events list and a photo gallery showing castles and sculptures.

A sample: From the "Tips" page: "Wet the sand! Not just wet, but really wet. The sand must be wet through and through if you want it to hold its shape. You can't have too much water. It will run out and find its own natural saturation point. The idea here is: Different sand, different saturation point, but all sand must be saturated!"