[ad_1]
By Isabelle Stanley, Dailymail.com
Updated at 11:42 on March 16, 2024, 11:44 on March 16, 2024
Instead of going to Disneyland, a California architect built the Happiest Place on Earth in his own backyard — and he let visitors in for free.
David Sheegog, 65, spent 25 years building a miniature replica of the Disneyland Railroad in his modest backyard in suburban Anaheim Hills and named it Green Mountain and Castle Peak and Thunder Railroad.
Sheegog grew up a stone’s throw from Disneyland, watching fireworks shows in the front yard with his parents, and when he had his own children, he was inspired to create a magical experience for them.
He started with a model placed on the dining room table, but over the years he has expanded to cover every inch of the yard, adding Snow White’s house, Splash Mountain and Sleeping Beauty’s castle.
He told the Daily Mail: “My favorite thing is not what we build but seeing how people enjoy it. When we hold open days I see families interacting with each other and sometimes I just sit People watching from the benches.”
An architect by training, Shego realized his dream in a meticulous, planned manner.
His first step was to ask his wife, Frances, if she could take over their backyard.
She agreed, and made one rule: There had to be room in the middle for their now-adult children to play.
After receiving permission, he began working on the design.
“We homeschool our children and I thought railways might interest them and it might be something they want to pursue,” he said.
“As they get older, I think they might be interested in electronics or gardening. It’s intended to be a living laboratory.
“But it turned out they were both more interested in playing with their friends, so it became a dad project.”
“I built a model for the whole thing that occupied our restaurant for a year. We had to eat in the kitchen,” he told the Orange County Register.
Luckily, the entire Sheegog family is obsessed with Disney. Shego worked on Davy Crockett’s Adventure Canoes at Disneyland, and the couple even named their daughter after Ariel from “The Little Mermaid.”
Initially, Sheegog started with a set of commercially produced model trains, which he modified to create detailed miniatures of all five Disneyland trains.
He paid great attention to detail and even color matched paint samples to the real trains.
Sheegog was very ambitious for his design, telling the Los Angeles Times: “Most of the garden railways I’ve seen, people bought pre-made small plastic building kits that measured about 12 inches x 8 inches.
“They look like little prefabricated buildings, like barbershops. No.’
He added: “I wanted to build this from scratch and wanted them to be impressive, like 5 feet wide and 4 feet tall. Or in the case of one of our castles, 7 feet tall.
“I had to plan where the main buildings would be.”
He started building it in 1999 and showed the first version to his friends and family in 2000.
Over the years, as the project grew, his techniques became more high-tech.
Some features he built from scenes, some he made from scratch, and some he 3D printed in recent years.
He added Sleeping Beauty Castle, the Haunted Mansion, Splash Hill, and Snow White’s Village, as well as references to nearly every Disney or Pixar film from 1937 to 2021.
The couple wouldn’t discuss construction costs, but estimate it adds up to about the same price as installing a swimming pool.
“We’re not rich people here, and I’m trying to figure out how to retire because there’s no way to do that right now,” he told the Los Angeles Times.
Occasionally visitors would ask how much it would cost to hire him to build them a Sleeping Beauty castle.
“They thought they could do it for $300 or $400, and I said, ‘Building that thing again would probably cost about $70,000,’ and it would take someone six months to build it,” he said.
In 2015, Higog and his wife began opening their garden to the public a few weekends each year, and tickets sold out almost immediately.
Admission is free, in part because the family doesn’t want to attract the attention of corporate lawyers.
“There was a lady here one time who was almost 100 years old,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “She was working the day the park opened, and Walt Disney was in the park at the time. She’d been working in the park her whole life.”
“She had a large crowd around her just listening to her talk about the situation. She started crying. As she spoke, she was reliving her life when she was 20, her first love, where she met her husband.
“All these memories come back, and a lot of people who come here do, because we’re in Anaheim.”
Although Sheegog hopes to retire this year, he has no plans to stop expanding the program.
He is designing two interactive experiences that include laser shows, holographic animations and live actors.
“We grew up with parks, and it holds a certain emotional place in your psyche. People just want to be around it, and our place provides an outlet for that,” he said.
[ad_2]
Source link