Thursday, October 27, 2011

Cemetery Entrance - come on in!


After much chatter about this darned project on Facebook, I am thrilled to finally be able to show it to you!

As you can see, the walkway to my front door is quite closed off and the door is tucked away. Normally I don't like this, but it leaves an amazing place for a cemetery, and the curve in the walkway makes for an amazing place for a cemetery entrance. For Halloween, this is an amazing layout.

When I started this, I had absolutely no idea what I was going to do. This was all very unplanned, and there were MANY changes made. I started documenting the process, but I think it's much better if we don't go into that... I think there are about 60 photos, and 2/3 are of things that aren't on the final product. But I had a lot of criteria that needed to be met for these.. They needed to be able to be disassembled, lightweight, tall enough for my husband to walk through, less than 20" wide (to fit into the attic), and STURDY!

Just to give a general overview, I basically made four boxes out of 1x2s. Two tall, thin boxes, and two short, wider boxes. I used 1/4" OSB to cover the bottom box, and spray painted them gray. The "rocks" on the bases will be worked on next year (I'm pretty much "over it" right now, and don't have the patience to touch them up), but they're made with spray insulation foam. I bought a can of a stone texture spray paint, but... they need much more than that. When I pull this out next year, I'm sure I'll update you on what I decide to do.

The top boxes were covered with 1/8" ply, and I drilled alllllll of those holes for the orange lights. If you're wondering what took me so long... YOU think about drilling over 100 holes and shoving lights through them, and tell me that you're still motivated :-p

Obviously, if I have lights going inside a column, I'm going to need to be able to access them. To do that, I only covered 3 sides of the top columns, and left the fourth open.


The open sides are placed on sides that won't be visible, but to conceal them even more, I placed "creepy cloth" over them. Now I have easy access to the lights (in case some get pushed in, or a light goes out or whatnot).



























My AWESOME misspelling (that I'm too lazy to change - maybe I'll have motivation to do it next year...



























I also scratched some messages into these trimmings to greet my guests, prior to staining...


All that's left to do is get some additional lighting so people will be able to see my effort! And while we're here, why don't we take a quick visit at the graveyard..?

Just a few shots, though... I've got a few things to "tweak" before I show the whole thing...



So what do you think? Are you a Halloween decorator, or more of a Christmas decorator?

5 comments:

  1. I love it! The entrance is grand and looks great! The scratched in messages look like so much fun. I bet it looks great at night.

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  2. @Stacie M Thanks! I like the scratched messages, too... but I think they're something that'll get overlooked a lot... Ahhhh welllll...

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  3. I love it! You did a great job. Thanks for taking pics and sharing.

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  4. @Dennis D. Really? You're thanking me for putting this on my blog..? Crazy kid :-p Thank YOU for readin'!!!

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  5. @Gina (Lady Goats)yes I was thanking you. Something wrong with that

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