Things went pretty well in 1999... we built the giant spider to drum up "business" and made some fancy entrance columns and a kind of long hallway leading back into the garage. We had a LOT of kids (200-300), sometimes they were standing in line all the way down the hallway and people going in were brushing past people going out.
One thing we discovered was that we were tired of tearing apart the whole garage.. Like many a suburban dweller, we use our garage as a storage-room and its filled with "stuff". After the exhausting process of cleaning out the garage, putting up walls and decorations and then putting it all back together so I could start building Christmas stuff.. we talked about doing it out on the driveway rather than the garage. The advantages are that we don't have to tear out the garage and we can arrange things so the kids don't have to walk out the same way they go in. The disadvantage is there are no walls available and no roof if it rains.
I decided to really try and put it out in the driveway this year. Its not the biggest driveway so it was a challenge. Also, I am "storage space challenged", that is I don't have room to store anything! Not being a farmhouse with cellar or attic or outbuilding I'm very concerned with the storage size of things. I wanted the props and the "house" itself to be storage-friendly (i.e. won't take up much room)
My original concept was to create "T" shaped wall units. By taking some 4x8 pieces of plywood on end and making a "T" shape out of them I could create a mini-maze easily, and by taking off one leg of the T they should store easily. Here was the plan I scrapped:
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After checking the cost of plywood, I decided on using cheap PVC pipe and black plastic.
In terms of content.... As usual I had to weigh the storageability of everything, and also the realization that most of our TOT's are small kids, so no gruesome bloody scenes....eyeballs in a jar are about it, a few skeletons, etc..
We started with the Giant Spider and some tombstones on the side of the house for the month of October
The pic shows
this years advertisement. The spiderweb is made from cheapie clothesline and sprayed grey
so it would show up against the white house. In the pic its a bit confusing because
you
can also see the shadow on the house. The giant spider went up and the tombstones. I added
the tiny fence mostly to keep the gardeners from mowing over all the stuff. If you look
closely you can see the "Glowing Eye Critters" between the bushes, these are new
for this year and work great at night.
In keeping with my "storage" requirements I wanted something impressive but easy to store. The Wall Of Pain is what I came up with. Based on a 4x8 sheet of plywood, the whole thing is only about 6 inches thick (when the back brace is removed) so its easy to store.
This shows the finished wall. Some plastic bones
glued on, some expanding foam squirted around and some creative painting and it looks
good. What you can't see from the picture is the fan powering the animation. The arm
sticking out on the right and the double-bone on the left have fishing-line going up to
small holes and to the back. They raise and lower based on the fans movement.
This shows the back of the prop with the exotic
high-tech animation system :-) basically the string goes through the hole, is guided by a
eye-bolt and ties to the side of the fan. I've substituted twine for the fishing-line so
its easily seen. Since the bones are the lightweight plastic kind and while one is going
up the other is going down, helping to counterbalance the weight, the net result is
virtually no drag on the fan. After Halloween I will take off the "legs" in the
back and store the wall in the garage. You can also see that I attached the bones to the
wall simply by drilling holes and using a twist-tie to hold them on.
This year I wanted the fog to spew out of a couple of props - the "wall of pain" and a box with a light. Since this meant getting the fog to come out of two places I needed a splitter, I also was pretty unhappy with last years chiller - a ice-chest with pipe through it - and wanted something better. After reviewing a lot of discussions about the various types of fog chillers, I figured "what the heck am I looking into exotic high-tech stuff for, it only needs to work for about 4 hours", so I changed plans and worked towards a box with ice in it and holes in the sides.
I needed a tube to get fog to the 2 different props, so I purchased 20 feet of 4" dryer pipe for a few bucks, cut it in half and taped it to the boxes. Then I started getting worried that maybe the fog wouldn't be chilled enough, so I decided on 2 boxes with ice in them. Then I started worrying that the fog would back up and not actually flow correctly, so I decided I needed a fan to blow air the right direction.
I
picked up a cheap fan from Radio Shack and was all ready to plug it in and have it pump
fog when I ran into a difficulty. My tubing was round and 4 inches and the fan was square
and 6 inches. So I pulled out the duct-tape and a couple pieces of cardboard and built a
adapter. In the pic you can see I have one side done. When complete I had a tube on both
ends with a fan in the middle (and a lot of duct-tape).
Once
I had the tubing all worked out I needed a way to connect them to the ice-boxes. I didn't
want it to be permanent as I wanted to tear it all apart easily and store it, so I picked
up a couple of cheapie clear plastic containers and cut a 2.8" hole in the sides of
them, lining the hole with duct-tape to keep the plastic from cracking. Then I just stuck
the pipe through. In the background you can see my high-tech "fog-dispersal"
system. Basically what I did was to drill a grid of small holes in the bottom of the wall
of pain, then I made a box with one end open and the other end has the fog pipe. By taping
the box to the wood I force the fog to come out of the small holes in the wall.
This pic
shows part of the system in use. The fog machine blows the fog into the first ice box
where it swirls around cooling down, then the fan pulls it from the box through the second
box and out the pipes. I don't have a pic of the whole thing in operation because during
the test I found that the small amount of pressure the fog machine creates by pushing the
fog into the box, forces the lid to raise slightly and fog leaks out of it all the way
around. As it was getting close to raining I had to stop testing and move it all indoors.
With a good duct-tape seal on the ice boxes it should work ok. I don't know how long the
ice will last, I bought a couple of 99-cent bags of ice for the test, and will probably
have to buy a few bags for Halloween. The good news is, a large amount of fog did go
through the system correctly and was adequately chilled on output..it should work great!
Unfortunately due to family issues I wasn't able to start building anything until the day of Halloween itself. As a result I had to race through building the haunt and decorating it all on Tuesday.
I started by
putting rebar into the ground and putting up 7-foot PVC pipes with to make the
walls.
After that the cross-braces and connecting
walls, The basic shape is a bit hard to see, but you will walk in from the street and go
back and forth up to the garage door where the candy will be.
After the frame was completed I then taped
black plastic (3-mil) to the frame using 3 full rolls of duct tape!
Once
the basic haunt was complete, my better half went to work decorating it while I
worked on getting some of the lawn decorations in place. This shows the yard, you can see
the giant spider and web in the distance. On the corner, we placed one of those talking
skulls, the wire for its microphone ran down the pole to the box which had a spotlight and
also a boom-box. I taped the microphone to the speaker and ran a endless-tape of
maniacal laughter. The hanging skeleton just barely visible on the left side uses fishing line to
go back to a oscillating fan behind the bushes which makes the skeleton swing.
You can see the
skeleton (and just barely, its fan) better here. In the background is the haunted garage
being set up. You can see the fog chilling and pumping system laid out and ready to go.
The box in the foreground is the "Thing in a box" box. And a better
picture of the front.
Here is a better
pic of the "Thing". The box had a boombox with growls in it and I bought a dozen "weasel balls"
the roll-around balls and put them inside, they bumped the sides of the box in a most
realistic fashion.
A little detail of
the front of the haunt. The columns are made of "Monster Mud" (part paint and
part drywall compound) over burlap. The skull talks and behind him is a strobe leading the
way into the haunt. The speaker on the right really booms out a "Welcome to the
haunted house" message.
Inside you are
greeted by the smoking box
- though it didn't come out in the picture, this has a deep red light inside and the fog
really looks cool as it oozes out of the box lit from below by the light.
The fog really
interfered with the flash
here so its tough to see, but in the background you can see the "Wall Of Pain"
in use and various decorations. The bright green box in the top is a strobe pointing at
the "wall".
My boys handing out candy and and
hiding behind a turn waiting to jump out and scare people. We gave out 2 pieces of candy
per kid and that bucket was filled to the top at the start and I had to make a candy run
at 7:30pm - I estimate 300-400 kids came through.
Here is a night shot of the yard.
And as
a finale - "The Garage Of Chaos", this is the cleanup that still lurks to be
done.
What worked and what didn't - first off the schedule really was terrible, due to family problems I didn't get to do much f anything until Halloween itself which resulted in a rushed unsatisfying day where I was too stressed and didn't really have much fun. What also didn't work was the PVC framework - it stood up but a decent wind would have caused too many problems and it resulted in little strength so we couldn't hang any heavier props. What worked great was the extra stuff on the lawn, this is a new area for us and I think it should be greatly expanded, people spent a lot of time kind of standing around looking at the lawn props and enjoying them. What also worked very well was the "maze" or "house" part of the haunt, having actual corners to go around, not knowing what is coming really made a difference over our old system of a big hallway lined with stuff. The fog worked very well and next year should go over the lawn as well as just the haunt.
