It took Gary Pruitt two months to build a colorful, elaborate ice castle outside his St. Paul home. It took two kids only a few minutes to destroy it.

At 4 a.m. Saturday, Pruitt said, he heard a commotion outside his home at East Fifth and Gotzian streets, just west of Johnson Parkway.

At first, he thought the noise was coming from a nearby bus stop. But when he looked out the window, Pruitt said Monday, he saw two boys vandalizing the ice castle he built in his yard.

Using a golf club, the boys — he thought they were between the ages of 10 and 14 — hacked away at the edifice that was 10 feet high, 50 feet long and made of about 700 blocks of ice.

Pruitt said he yelled at the boys in his “biggest, nastiest voice,” which startled them.

“It was fun just watching them run down the street and yelling at them,” he said.

Pruitt, who didn’t report the vandalism to police, said one of the boys lost a tennis shoe in a snowbank as he ran away.

“The shoe’s my war trophy,” he said. “I’m thinking of bronzing it and putting it on my roof.”

Pruitt, 57, said he was inspired to build the ice castle by the 1992 St. Paul Winter Carnival ice palace, a photo of which hangs in his bathroom. After staring at it day after day, he said, he finally decided to make his own.

Starting in mid-December, he began making the ice bricks. He attached a hose to his kitchen faucet and filled up empty shoeboxes and milk jugs with water mixed with food coloring to form the ice bricks. He made and stored the bricks on his tarp-lined back deck.

At one point, he was making 30 ice bricks a day, mostly in subzero temps, he said.

He started building the ice castle during the first weekend of the Winter Carnival in late January. A handful of friends helped the first day, but he worked mostly alone the following days. Construction was completed within a week.

Then, he put lights inside the castle so it would glow at night.

If the kids hadn’t destroyed it, the ice castle was solid enough to have lasted until May, he said.

Instead of repairing the castle, he said, he knocked down what remained with a sledgehammer.