Haunt at Great Oak
Making the Haunt at Great Oak
We used several approaches to the haunt construction:
- pre-made décor – spending some time on Amazon.com etc. to see what looks interesting. This can be low to medium cost (depending on the item) and a low time investment once installed. Of course, this might mean your decorations are the same as 10 other houses in your neighborhood.
- modifying pre-existing décor – buying something pre-made and adding to it. We did this with small foam tombstones – we made them more interesting by painting parts with inexpensive glow-in-the-dark paint from a local big box store. The paint was less than $5 for 2 colors. Another way was to purchase creepy ghoul masks and filling them with spray foam to give more body and weather resistance. This approach can be of medium cost, but some time investment.
- constructing from scratch – the only limit is your imagination (and your budget). Spray foam insulation is a great medium for sculpting, and foam board insulation can be used for carving and construction. This approach requires good planning, math, many visits to home improvement stores and good tools to work with, but the results can be amazing. Depending on your scope, the material cost can be low, but the time investment – considerable.
No matter what approach you choose, it's all about spooky fun, adding variety to your existing décor, or maybe, creating a theme to build on. It helps to identify "the main characters" and maybe invest the most in those, with secondary parts being less involved. You are the maker of your domain, so not everything needs to be from scratch and the main goal is to have fun creating.
Above all, humor and fun are essential ingredients for any decorating. We enjoyed making our haunt and will undoubtedly be adding to it for years to come. So we hope to see you again next Halloween, as Haunt at Great Oak rises again.