It's a Long, Hard Road...

Here is one more picture of the yard. I am almost finished editing all of the pictures. They will be up tomorrow or friday hopefully. Good old MonTiki, one of my first props I ever made, a 6 ft tall sexy hunk of Dow Blue foam.



I was just looking at my google calendar for November. It's mostly empty now. A few bills here, a couple holidays there, and eye exam follow up. It was a big relief.

Just for fun, here are the last three months. I have removed all the personal events so this is just prop making things I needed to do. Dark orange is for weeknight tasks, bright orange is for working in the garage at Patty's house. Welcome to my nightmare! By the way, I had started way back in april but it was a casual thing. Those were easy days!

Build Season Week 9

Halloween is now 8 days away!!

This weekend we were putting the finishing touches on a lot of props. teeth for one guy, feet for another, repairing props from last year that were damaged in storage.

We got cauldron creep out and put him together.





I finished the wiring on firebringer which makes no sense from the pictures but runs of two separate tealight led flicker circuits.






I paper mached the last of my corpses, which took 6 hours! Man what a pain.





I built a stand for this very heavy bucky skeleton and a table.



Next week will have some building but will be most setting up and testing the black light tunnels and the volcano. I am scrambling to finish my projects at home and maintain my relationship, as this is the time of year when my GF hates me for making such a huge mess and ignoring her. Mostly it is the mess though.

Build Season Week 8

Another busy weekend, so busy in fact there are only a few pictures in comparison to how much got done. I did two 14 hour days to get as much done as I could. I am so tired and sore, and if I didn't have to earn a living I'd be back tonight.

We finished the Tower of Death:


And we finished the volcano:




I started the mache on my Sconce corpses:




Zac made a corpse for our man eating vines to attack:


Lava Creep got a head:




Other things that got done but not photographed:

scared corpse got mached
firebringer is mache ready
lantern corpse is mache ready
reed scarecrows made
carver creep got a stand and primed
candles got finished and painted
skulls cast
and probably some stuff I forgot!

I am so tired today. Think I might go sleep in my car for lunch.

Build Season Week 7

Patty and I put in three whole days of work this weekend with everyone else doing full days on Saturday and Sunday. We got a lot of stuff done. Except for me, almost everybody's projects are done or almost done. Now everyone just has to pitch in to get everything done. I mean they have to help me finish my projects. Yay halloween?

Patty and Tricia weather some voodoo dolls:


Zac and Tricia prime and paint a giant cheetoh:


I adjusted the eyes on volcano to be more scary:


Zac, Tricia and Patty weather the wood on the tower of death:


Kendra touches up the paint of volcano:


and she made us a bunch of hands:


I built the frames for the tarp covered black light area:


Zac starts one more corpse:


I worked on my Sconce Corpses:






and Cappy took a nap:

Build Season Week 5

Oh what a headache! Come on Volcano, be done already!!!

More guys and ghouls in the haunted garage this last weekend.









Man it doesn't look like much but we got a lot done. Zac made a ground breaker in a day and half. Tricia got started on voodoo dolls and candles and stemmed her venus flytraps. Patty's tiki mask from last week got painted and hooked up with a motor, but I forgot to photograph that. Joe got more work on the bridge done. I cast skulls and jaws all week end long and built the "Tower of Death" as we call it with the neighbors. You can see the Firebringer perched up top practicing his prayers.

This weekend coming up is the do or die build days. The Volcano must be done or all of halloween starts to slide in to failure and abandoned projects.

Build Season Week 2

I only have pictures from Saturday as I forgot my camera in the garage on sunday (your ghost host does not actually live in simi valley). However, you can see big things were happening over the weekend.

Big Plans

I sat down with Google's free 3-d application Sketchup and started to layout the plans for our volcano we are making for this year's halloween.

I wanted this to be easy to setup and easy to take down, and be reusable next year. I built the model to scale and used standard building materials. One sheet 1/2' plywood, two sheets of luan, and a hand full of 2x4s. For the surface we are going to make rocks out of styrofoam blocks and use great stuff foam for lava.



The sides are made of luan because (1.) we're gonna chuck it on november 1st and (2.) we need to bend them to conform to the edge of the yard/grass. The reusable part is the doorway, the top par with the eye holes, and the walkway. You can almost see how it will be a robot in 4 years from now, and will give a good base for next years new Haunt theme.

This is the empty yard:



Here is the basic layout for the haunt with the volcano. Yes, I did measure the house out and the yard, so everything is to scale:



To aid in construction I made a grid in sketch up that I laid over the model. It is in 1 square foot units. This will help draw out the design and let you quickly figure how big each part is. This needs to be easy to understand since none of us are carpenters.


Here is a rough idea of what it will look like:



Here is a shot of the backside. You can see it will be very stable. I plan on using bolts for the connections between the bigger parts, so that it can be broken down quickly and to a small size for storage.



Can't wait to get started on it!