Haunt Your House

2011-09-09T11:51:00.000-07:00

Here it is just Sept. 09th and we are already starting to put up the indoor Halloween decorations! We have a huge desk system set up here that's shaped like a big "O" with a section missing to enter through. We are going to set up our LeMax Halloween village all the way around the whole top of the desks since it runs all the way around. It's a big space and we have a ton of pieces so we should be able to cover most of the top. We'll leave it up year round since we spend so much time in here. Might as well enjoy it all year long. Our old house in California was always decked out in "early Goth" as we called it. Since we were Goth-like before it became popular, it was just the way the house was. Skeletons hanging in closets, skulls all over my desk area along with my collection of horror figures. Halloween lights all over the walls and ceilings. It was great! Then we moved here and since the house was so white inside and Spooky decided that he wanted to keep it that way for a while, we lost our gothness. I missed it and kept my spare room looking like the old me but that went away the first time my mom came to visit. The fake baby skeleton hanging up in there just freaked her out too much.

We have decided that it's time to reclaim our dark selves and haunt our house inside and out all year long. After all, it goes with our business and it goes with our selves as well. As we've gotten older now, we've decided that it's time to just be ourselves again and stop trying to conform to "normal".

We now have a permanent Scarecrow in our front yard, after we started doing a "Raising of the Scarecrow" ritual but we decided to leave him up this past year and he needs some work. A new hat since the old one faded in the desert sun. And his stuffing needs repacking and refilling after last winter's rain. But he still looks pretty cool hanging up there year round like he's protecting our yard and home.

We have so many boxes of Halloween decorations, I don't know what all we'll put up yet but we've decided to put them up in September and leave some stuff up until Thanksgiving so we can enjoy them a bit more. Some stuff we'll leave up year round since no one comes out to visit us anymore.

We found a huge box filled with Halloween lights, orange, purple, candy corn colored. We may put some up on the outside of the house this year and inside as well. We always keep a black lace mantel curtain on our fireplace. It has spiders and web shapes woven into it. Then we put up a string of LED lit pumpkins and bats but the bats burned out within a week. Have to look for a new set of those!

Anyway, that's it so far, we'll keep you up-dated with the house haunting for Halloween 2011 as it goes up!

2010-09-01T17:40:00.000-07:00

Well, it's September 1st and we always want to have the most haunted looking house in the neighborhood! So we've started doing our indoor decorating around the house. We actually started putting up a few Halloween things a couple weeks ago. This happens every year, we start to feel the the temperature get cooler, especially at night, and it puts us in a Fall mood. It's still in the 90's in the daytime so we've been going out to our storage container early in the mornings and sorting through the Halloween decorations to put up this year both inside and out.

We've been trying to find some new things to put up for our yard haunt this year that are new and coming up with ways to make the house look more spooky on the outside. This year we really want to knock 'em dead with our decorations and our yard haunt!

We took a trip to Michael's Arts & Crafts because they usually start putting the Halloween stuff out about now and found some new stuff for this year indoors. They had some great resin tombstones that you can insert a picture in so we got one for everyone in the family and we will make up our faces to look zombie like and add those to the tombstones. I also need to make some new Halloween wreaths, a couple pumpkin dioramas and set up a scene for our ever growing LeMaxx Spookytown collection.

Try this new website, HalloweenDecorations101.com for some great ideas! It's a new site that is very informative and has some great stuff on it that should inspire you!

2010-05-22T11:31:00.000-07:00

Been working on some new ideas for haunting the yard this year. We may grow a small corn field to make a maze. We have the property size to do it on and where we live, growing season is year round so it might be fun to try growing corn and mow a maze through it in the fall. Have to plant it just right, we don't want it to be too dried out for Halloween or it will be a fire hazard, it needs to be a bit green for the big night. Lots of planning to do for this to be pulled off so we'll let you know how this is going.

2010-02-21T19:19:00.000-08:00

Building your own haunted house for Halloween is no easy task. Whether you do it in your own yard or decide to go "professional" and try your hand at a money making haunt, you have to do things right! There are several ideas on what to do at Yard Haunter.com from making entrance ways to room decor to suite the theme to lighting and fog machine use.

You need to lay out a floor plan on how you want a walk thru to go, if you plan on doing that kind of haunt. If you are doing it for a charity or city, you'll need to find out what the fire laws are because, believe me, the inspectors will be there in force. In our town, a small haunt was being set up for the town and never opened, we assume because of fire marshal problems and getting passed to open.

The easiest way to do a home haunt is to use your front or back yard, make an open air walk thru, have a grave yard, add all kinds of scary stuff to an outdoor theme. Make it short but make it scary, keeping in mind that people will be bringing thier kids along so you may want to tone down the gore.

You'll find more info that can help at GotFog.com and Halloween-Online.com that should make your home haunt a great one!

2009-05-17T21:02:00.000-07:00

We are going to try something new this year for our yard haunt. Usually we have a haunt set up in front and to the side of our house. We have a couple acres, so we have plenty of room to lay out a great haunt. Usually we have it start in the front and then run it to the back. We are thinking about starting it in the back property and running it around in an "L" shapr to the front. Actually, turn that "L" upside down and flip it so it's facing the other way and you get the picture.

We want to add a new mausoleum to the grave yard and have a Pepper's Ghost inside it. We'll be making the basic masoleum out of doubled sheets of foam insolation. It's a denser foam than Styrofoam. We'll make a big square building, cut a window in the fornt and add our effect. It should look pretty cool when we get done. We'll keep you posted!

Check out more great ideas for haunting your house and yard at Yard Haunter and Halloween Online.

2009-02-13T12:53:00.000-08:00

We really out did ourselves for Halloween 2008! Even with all the election crap going on, the high gas prices and the fake recession, we still had a great Halloween! I think people just wanted a night to cut loose and forget about it all because we had more visitors to our yard haunt than ever before.

We added a Pepper's Ghost effect in a large crypt in the grave yard and everyone loved it! We added some low laying fog machines, a bunch more tombstones and a new fence around the graveyard area. When you have a couple acres of land, you have a lot to work with! We got some great ideas, as usual, from Halloween Online and The Yard Haunter. They had a bunch of new articles to choose from and we made some simple changes to our old haunt that really made it better. Check out Halloween Family for a complete list of all the Halloween Online sites, there's an unlimited amount of info to help make your Halloween better there! Here's looking at a GREAT 2009!! We are already making plans for new stuff, we'll pass them along as they get built!

2008-08-04T22:09:00.000-07:00

88 days until Halloween and we haven't started building the new props for this year. We may go with purchased items instead just because time is running short and life gets in the way. Halloween Online has some great new artciles in the 2008 listings that should make life easier this year. Also found Halloween Black Light, a site about lighting effects. It should come in handy since we want to go heavy on the lighting this year.

2007-10-28T16:42:00.000-07:00

The BIG NIGHT is almost here! Are we ready for it? No, but with everything we've done, it will be impressive anyway. Truth is, we could never get it all done in time unless we were planning two years in advance and we've already started planning for next year as we've been putting together this years haunt.

We've got the graveyard set up for the most part. We'll hold off on actually setting up tombstones until Wednesday morning in case of wind, we have some nasty wind storms out here. We've hung some Bucky skeletons from some trees, those are heavy enough that wind doesn't bother them too much. At least light wind.

We noticed a whole bunch of new prject articles at Halloween Online this year. Those guys must be working thier butts off getting things done! There's a bunch of new recipes and food effects in the Recipe section. There's a Craft section now, my wife loves doing crafts so she's all geared up! The Decorations section has some new ideas as well.

This year we have a haunted graveyard that's gotten bigger. Then you follow a path to the haunted house maze set up in the big garage out back, it's got rooms off the maze with a mad doctor lab, a meat market, vampires, monsters. Thank goodness we have a bunch of friends that love to help out! We do this for free, for our trick-or-treaters. If they make it to the end, they get treats.

After the night's haunting there's the party for everyone who helped out. Should be a wonderful night! Exhausting, too! Then we take a week off, put everything in storage and start planning for next year!

2007-10-01T05:38:00.001-07:00

October 1st is here and we are in full swing getting ready for our haunt on Halloween! It's been a fun year of planning and making new things to add to our haunt. We are going to set up a great graveyard this year!!

We also started decorating our home for Halloween. I've been busy making some Halloween wreaths. I've also decorated some shirts for the hubby and I to wear during October.

We found some great craft and decorating ideas at Halloween Online. That's the coolest Halloween website that I have ever seen! There's recipes, costume ideas, craft ideas, party games for the kids, party ideas for our grown-up party, all kinds of stuff! Plus they have like 30 other web sites that are for specific things like fog machines (hubby loves that site), yard haunting ( we both love that site), Halloween recipes, adult costumes, Halloween safety tips, just a ton of sites that I found on their link page.

With all these ideas, we may go broke this year just putting on our annual Halloween haunt and party but it will sure be something we all remember for years to come!

2004-02-26T01:48:00.000-08:00

Our house is the "Haunted House" on our road and the kids love coming around on Halloween. Starting on October 1st, we put up our inside decorations and hang lights up outside. As the days go by, we add more stuff outside for our yard haunt. For our family, it's more fun than Christmas!

We've collected a huge amount of decorations over the past 20 years, we had to buy a cargo container to keep it all in! We put up wreaths that we've made, displays that we've made and bought, spooky pictures get hung in place of the usual ones that hang up all year. We put a Halloween themed garland on the mantle of our fireplace with orange lights running through it. We just go crazy this time of year!

We hang lights on the house just like Christmas lights but we use orange or purple or the mixed lights with green, orange and purple. Sometimes we use them all, one color for the roof lights, another to go around doors and another to go around windows. It's a good thing our lots are big in this area, our neighbors think we are nuts as it is, if they lived close and could see everything we do outside they'd run away in fear!

We just love Halloween, what can I say?