Seasonal Decorating: Halloween Edition

You should know that I am a little bit obsessed with seasonal and holiday decor. Like, if I had an unlimited budget we would have that 20ft inflatable grim reaper and the still large but not quite as massive skeleton playing an organ made of bones I saw at Lowe’s in our yard right this very second. Christmas would cause our electricity bill to go up by 300% and there would be a real life Easter bunny sitting in our yard come April.

Sadly, we had a very limited, very real budget so we ended up hand crafting most of our decorations this year. I guess I could have just taped the roof repair bill we just got to the front of the house and that would have been scary enough….hm, maybe next time.

First up, we made a graveyard complete with ghost tree.

Everything here was really simple. For the ghosts, I just grabbed some styrofoam balls and black craft paint from Hobby Lobby and picked up some cheesecloth from Home Depot. We thought we still had some cheesecloth buried in our garage but we couldn’t find it so I just picked up a new pack since it’s pretty cheap. You just dab some black paint on the ghosts to make eyes/mouths and then cover them with some cut up cheesecloth.

The most difficult part was probably hanging them. We picked up some eyelet hooks but the ones we grabbed were too small to work. Instead of heading back to Home Depot, we just used normal screws and tied some clear wire around them to hang on the branches.

They’ve been pretty sturdy even with all of the wind we’ve had – we’ve only lost one so far.

The tombstones are made out of scrap plywood. We just used some of the left over paint from when we painted the downstairs back in April and then painted the words with the same paint I used for the ghosts. Then we just slapped some garden stakes on the back and plopped those suckers in the ground with only medium difficulty.

The middle tombstone went as far in the ground as we could get it and instead of moving it, we got lazy and left it as is.

On the other side of the driveway, we hung a plastic skeleton on our lamp post. You may notice that there’s a lot less greenery around this than when we updated it a few months ago. More on that later this week.

We probably wouldn’t have bought this guy, but the Halloween decor at Lowe’s was on sale and we got an extra 30% off because he was missing an arm.

If anything, I think it just makes him creepier.

Moving across the yard, we come to the witch.

This is my favorite decoration, I think. We just used a Martha Stewart template to trace out the witch on some plywood (with help from Gatsby, of course).

Kyle cut her out with the jigsaw and then I gave her a coat of black paint on each side. We sunk some conduit in the ground and strapped her to it. She’s supposed to have a broom in the other hand but true story: Barley ended up getting stuck, freaking out, and bending the conduit – sending the witch flying across the yard all before we could decide on what to use for a broom and get it secured. We have to put her back in the ground sometime this week before Halloween.

We bought a bunch of those lanterns last year from Big Lots to use as centerpieces for our rehearsal dinner. I just grabbed one out of the garage and we secured it with one of the same brackets we used for the conduit. We added a color changing LED tea light to her lantern so at night it glows red, yellow, green, orange, and purple.

We bought everything that’s on the porch instead of going the DIY route- the hanging guy (whose eyes glow red), and the web/spiders on the window came from Target.

That faded pumpkin came from Hobby Lobby last year…it should probably be retired soon or at least cleaned up a bit.

The welcome mat was on sale at either Lowe’s or Home Depot – can’t remember which (sorry!).

I also picked up this sign that currently lives next to the porch. I got it at Hobby Lobby for 40% off.

The pumpkins came from our pumpkin picking adventure a couple of weekends ago and the giant planter of mums was on clearance at Lowe’s (obviously, clearance is the secret word today).

It doesn’t look like there will be any pumpkin carving this year…

Last but not least, my construction paper bats.

I found a template online because if I tried to draw these free handed they would probably look like butterfly-snowflake hybrids (artist, I am not). I just traced them out on construction paper, cut them out, and used glue dots to stick them on the windows in the living room. We already had the construction paper so I didn’t even have to pay anything. Bonus!

My favorite view of these guys is at night. We bought an orange bulb to put in the lamp in our living room so at night there’s a nice orange glow behind the bats.

Of course, the cats have been trying to rid the house of these beasts ever since the first one went up.

We didn’t do any decorating inside the house this year nor are we having the Halloween party we had wanted to but I promise we’ve been busy with other things that I’ll share soon!