Hi guys! We decorated the front yard for Halloween last weekend — we love Halloween around here! — and here I am with a few tips on how to maximize the haunted look for just a few bucks.
A custom cemetary takes up a big portion of the lawn and can be set up quickly. It’s impressive, yet it’s an easy DIY (and it doesn’t take too much storage space during the rest of the year, either…). It’s also a smooth way to encourage treat-or-treaters not to step on the lawn (and your flowerbeds) when they run up to the house.
We set up ours using a couple of dollar-store plastic skulls and skeleton arms. The foam headstones were bought at Walmart a few years ago; they came with too-small plastic pins, that didn’t hold up well when the wind caught them, so I used skewers (the kind we use in the kitchen) and pushed them half inside the foam, half underground. We also made a few small crosses using scrap pieces of wood that we nailed together and half-hasardly sprayed with black paint. Spiderwebs complete the look, along with a couple of pirate flags (because why not).
This year I also added a giant spider web using white cable string. It was a simple matter of knotting the cables in a spider web shape, stringing part of it to a high point. What’s missing? Oh yeah: a SPIDER! Later that week I bought a hairy spider from Walmart to install there (not pictured, sorry!).
The collapsible ghost is something we’ve had for years — it’s not as clean as it looks in the photo… — and I also wrapped some dollar-store Halloween ‘danger’ tape around the porch. This is another trick if you want to keep kids off a certain area of your front lawn: just tape off that portion, and it will double as decor.
The one pricey item we have is a spooky metal sign on the front door, which was around 20$ or 30$. Again, it’s something we’ve had for years, that I bought at Winners/HomeSense during Halloween time. At some point I’m hoping to make a homemade wreath — just not this year. Meanwhile, I love that spooky sign! And I don’t even care that the thing clangs on the door everytime the kids go in or out! Haha.
So here is the full look for our front yard this year. Happy Halloween all!
