Spookify Your House

It’s a great week for Halloween decorating. Decorating the outside of the house has become a family’s favorite things to do each year. What started with a couple of carved pumpkins put out on the front stoop the night before Halloween has grown into a weekend-long family activity filled with store-bought and hand-made decorations. Here are five fun, easy and inexpensive ways to get ready for the big day.

1. Dollar Store: There are many varieties of these discount stores and many are filled with Halloween ideas. In less than an hour you can fill a basket full of decorations and not pay a whole lot for it. Home Depot: Grab some chicken wire and put your sculpting skills to work. Yellow caution tape, like that used at crime scenes, is the perfect way to set up a pathway to direct Trick-or-Treaters to your dungeon of doom. Like guardrails on both sides of a walkway, zig zag the caution tape around the yard before delivering all visitors to your door.

2. Get crafty: Cheesecloth, tissue paper, plastic bags and (old) sheets make great ghosts of all sizes. Posterboard can be transformed into a scary collage, or be used to warn trick-or-treaters of impending doom if they get any closer to the house. The wicked witch’s legs in this picture are actually a mannequin dressed in tights and shoes and stuck into an urn.

3. Let spider webs and skeletons be part of the decor. You can install an expansive cobweb outdoors, either hanging from your home or in a large tree. Buy a skeleton, but rather than hanging it up, have some parts stick out of a mound of dirt either on the ground (maybe in a fresh grave) or in a wheelbarrow near the front porch. It will really scare kids if they happen to bump into it when they are getting candy.

4. Water-soluable paint is a lot of fun and you can make the pumpkin be whatever you want it to be. Or use the melon as the body of something bigger. Dress it like a “Mr. Pumpkinhead,” with a hat, paper-towel rolls as arms and legs, and glued-on googly eyes. Or découpage pumpkins with Halloween napkins and Mod Podge. Try using cream faux pumpkins from Michael’s.

5. Easy special FXs and instant decor: Replace the front-porch lights with colored light bulbs. Blacklight, blue and red are great to set a scary mood. Get CDs with scary sounds (or, happy Halloween songs) and play them when trick-or-treaters come calling. Grandin Road offers an entire on-line catalog worth of quality Halloween decor that you won’t find anywhere else.