Fence Panels & Clay Toes

We made good progress last weekend, assembling all the new fence panels for the graveyard this year. Each panel is comprised of two wood furring strips and nine pieces of PVC.
Much measuring, drilling, screwing and innuendo ensued...
And voila! 31 fence panels, ready to be spray painted black this weekend!
I finally finished the clay toes this weekend too - 25 little toes made of modeling clay, with a ring through each heal.

They were baked for 10 minutes at 350 degrees, and Brent painted the toes black for a final touch. Now they're all ready to go!
Wait a second...what are these toes for? Anyone care to take a guess?

Photos of some of our new props coming soon, and I need to finish the invitations to be sent out on Saturday!

Progress on the Fence

Last weekend we made good strides with our new graveyard fence. We started out by cutting all the PVC pipe into three and four foot sections. Then Brent set up a "painting table" out of sawhorses & plywood, and started spraying. It takes a lot of black spray paint to cover white pipe!

Then we cut the furring strips into six foot lengths, and traced nine holes on each. There's Brent, hard at work...
The drill press made drilling the holes go at a fairly fast clip, once we figured out that we needed a sharper bit. Still, it was a lot of holes, so we didn't finish up until late in the evening. Voila - the first small pile of rails drilled and ready for paint. This pile was much larger by the time we got finished.
We did a lot of shopping last weekend too, which I forgot to get photos of, and bought some clay for toes. I'll post pics of those this weekend. We got some new Scene Setters for the operating room (surgery), and a plasma ball (remember those?). We also got some cool salt & pepper shakers, and a nicely spooky napkin holder. We found the shot syringes too, nice not to have to pay shipping for those! I need to mix up some jello shots, and make sure they'll work okay with those.

More to come soon...time is flying right by, and the party is just 5 weeks away! Yikes!

New Graveyard Fencing

Last year on Halloween night, we had problems with parents stepping over our low fence - followed closely by their kids. Because we have all kinds of electrical cords, etc snaked through the lawn decorations, we prefer that kids especially stay out of the graveyard proper, just to keep anyone from tripping & hurting themselves. So we decided it was time for a "proper" graveyard fence.

We got the instructions online (see the HauntProject.com link to the right), and Brent decided to build a panel just to see how it would look, how hard it would be, etc. Turns out it was pretty darn easy, as you can see above. These 6ft panels just stake into the yard with rebar, and are made of 1/2 inch PVC pipe and 2 inch furring strips. Obviously we need finials to put on top of the posts...we're still looking for something suitably haunting.

We need 32 panels to do both halves of our graveyard, so today we bought 90 PVC pipes and 60 furring strips, 2 more boxes of nails and another box of black spray paint. Once all the panels are finished, we'll add some moss & creepy cloth to finish off the look. Can't wait to see what it looks like all put together!

This weekend we also bought bloody tablecloths, and cheap MP3 players with cheap speakers for sound effects around the house. Can't believe we didn't think of it before, but it's the perfect solution for getting specific sound effects to match individual "scenes".

Now if we could just pin down the invitation format...