Build Season Week 3

Gosh dang it was hot in Simi this weekend! 103 degrees with no breeze. Luckily nothing in Simi is on fire, however EVERYWHERE around "the valley" where I live is on fire.



Have a great Labor Day weekend everyone!

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.

This is the lovely Mourning Rose Manor yard display in Simi Valley. I just heard about it this last year. I am looking forward to going to see it, and since it runs every night thru October I won't have to miss it. They have a great set of animated props including a flying ghost, a rocking chair corpse, some pop up ghouls, and a very creepy grave digger.

Here are some great shots of the display:














Check out all of their pictures at Mourning Rose Manor's photo page.

Mourning Rose Manor runs every night of October and is located at 5250 Aurelia Street, Simi Valley, CA.

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!

The Build Season has Begun

We got started in earnest this last weekend on halloween props for 2009!