Cheapy and Creepy

Halloween is probably our favorite holiday, so we like to make sure that the house feels just a little creepy to get everyone in the mood. We didn't want to spend a lot this year, though, so here are some of my secrets to a wallet-friendly spooktacular space.

There are a couple of small details around the house that I love. We don't have a mantel, so under the TV acts as a nice decorating platform.

Black fabric draped over stacks of books or blocks gives a nice 'uneven ground' to start with. I then layered it with white spiderwebs to give it a spooky feel. Add props to give it dimension and one more thin layer of spider webbing and you're done! Webbing can be reused year to year if it's stored in a ziplock bag, so we haven't purchased webbing in a couple of years. The props came from the dollar store or knick knacks that were 90% off at Target after last year's Halloween. Keep interesting (and non interesting such as salsa, sauces, etc.) jars and clean them out really well. There are printable fun tags online that you can tape or glue to them. You can even skip the labels and just add water and a little food coloring to add a creepy mad scientist effect.

Our french doors needed a little something more than being strung up with spider webs (like last year), so I decided to take a hint from The Walking Dead and make them look really spooky. I saved up cardboard for a month or so and cut it so that it looked like boards. I then just hot glued them together in layers until it created a good canvas for my signs. Lastly, I sloppily spray painted the words and allowed them to dry in the garage.

Remembering that we had left over wreath hangers around, we just used those to hang them on the door. Depending on if your doors are opened or closed most of the time will depend on what door gets what sign, but when ours are closed they look like this. (They do tend to stay open more often then not).

In the old dining area (which has been dubbed by a friend of ours as 'The Salon'), we just replaced our regular pictures with some smaller haunted pictures that were at Target for $1 each. They're kind of small so I'd like to replace them at some point, but for now, they do the job.

The guest bathroom is always fun. I reused the 'bloody' shower curtain from last year (made with a dollar store shower curtain, some red craft paint, and my hands) and the fake dead hand that I found at Walmart for $2 probably 5 years ago. If you want to make your bathroom really feel like it's from Psycho, unscrew all but one bulb just enough so that they don't glow. It makes it so guests can still see, but it gives it an eerie effect, too.

The most fun we had this year was in the front of the house. I had seen something on Pinterest about silhouettes and decided that the garage could use a little zombie love. I took some of my leftover cardboard and used hot glue to make four pieces the size of our garage windows. Then, I traced my left hand repeatedly with sharpie in different gruesome positions. Once I had a configuration I liked, we cut them out of the cardboard with an X-acto knife.

Then they were painted with some black spray paint we happened to have in the garage.

I then just used some duct tape to attach them to the door. I also placed some wax paper behind each one so that the green-light-bulbed work lamp we hung from the garage door opener would be diffused a little.

The results were pretty amazing from the outside.

It looked great, especially with our larger window harboring a grim reaper large window cling ($4, after Halloween special at Target, but could be made like the hands out of cardboard) and a couple of foam tombstones (dollar store). We just replaced the regular light bulb with a green one in a stand up lamp in our dining room to match both window colors.

Together, they really set a creepy mood for anyone approaching the house.

Later on, we were able to turn on a jack-o-lantern in the bottom left corner of the large window.

On the outside, though, it adds just a hint of a haunting.

We really love the way everything turned out, and nothing says Halloween more than approaching a house that looks either haunted or full of Halloween fanatics!

We hope this inspires you to really spook up your own haunt this October! Do you have any other great tips for awesome Halloween decor on a budget? Let us know in the comments!

Little By Little

The garage has been an ongoing project in the house. When we moved in, we knew it would need some work. It was in good shape, it just needed some storage and counter space so we could accomplish more things throughout the rest house. We started by getting the entire garage generally organized with what was already built. For more on that, check out the blog post here.

Since the initial clean up, we've managed to work a little at a time to give everything a home. It's probably been about six months, but it was totally worth it.

After the above pictures was taken, I tore out the far side of the shelves to leave more space for walking into the garage. Scott also mounted the two blue cabinets (that were originally in our tiny laundry room) so we could have some elevated storage space. Sorry about the quality of the rest of the pictures, they were all taken with my phone.

Still a mess, but a mess in progress!

I found some pegboard about a month ago and attached it to the wall with some 1x1s that we had in the scrap wood pile. For all of $14, we finally had a place to put our tools! Previously, they were literally in a heap on the ground just outside the garage door. Safe, right?!

One of the pegboards is dedicated to just hand tools. I even used our old kitchen knife magnet (right) to hold chisels and saw blades.

The other is just for painting equipment. Paint trays are perfect to stick on pegboards because the feet just loop over the top. Easy peasy!

It's amazing how much storage space all of the paintbrushes, rollers, tape, and putty knives took up! Once they were out of the way, we could move on to Phase 4: Workbench.

This was probably the most arduous task...

Not really. It was easy. I just pulled off the top shelf of the existing unit and called it a day.

It's the perfect workbench height and once we mount lights (currently sitting on the workbench) under the metal cabinets, we will have a great space to work on all kinds of projects, big and small!

I know this probably isn't exciting to anyone but Scott and I, but believe me, "Woohoo!"s are in order. We can finally walk into the garage, grab a screw driver, complete a task, and put the screwdriver back without threat of being stabbed or cut from some errant blade or saw in our 'Tool Pile'. We also have enough space to work on smaller items that might need soldering or some simple repair without having to use the kitchen counter.

The only downside is that we only have one outlet in the garage...and it's on the other side of the car itself. We need to put an outlet or two near the workbench to really make it fully functional, but for now, we're just happy to have something resembling an efficient work space!

Do you have a work area like this in your garage? Do you think it's useful or a waste of storage space for other items? Let us know in the comments!

A Bench Ruling

This will be a quick post (because the project is nowhere near complete), but I thought it would be fun to let you know that some demo has been happening in the Sturdivant household! Actually, not IN the household...more like, in the garage of the household.

Anywho, I figured I would just leave this quick time lapse video I made here to wet your appetite for some future pegboard hangin', cabinet mountin', bench perfectin' action. Enjoy!

That's right! I finally took half of those shelves out. I found out a couple of things in the process, too. First is that they were apparently made from old scrap pieces of equipment boxes for some electrical company, so that's kind of cool. The second is that you have to ALWAYS wear your gloves when doing demo. I took them off at one point (don't worry, I was wearing close toed shoes and safety glasses), but forgot to put them back on. Oops. Just a little scratched up on my hand. I won't post the picture here, but it's kind of gross.

This month is going to be super busy for us, but I'll try to keep you updated on projects as we have time to complete them.

Have a good week!

An Imagination Station

Our garage is a single car garage. It might not be huge, but it definitely acts as many different spaces for us. We build, paint, cut, and store our stuff there as well as our car (especially with the snowy winter we've been having). Unfortunately, we hadn't really had a chance to give it any love because we were so worried about the rest of the house. Yesterday, though, the weather was nice enough that I was able to spend 4 hours cleaning it up and out. Now it's much closer to a workable area.

I wish I had a good picture of the before. I kind of started working on it on a whim, so I was about halfway done when I realized I hadn't taken any pictures. Needless to say, though, it was a disaster. There was barely enough room to walk around the car when it was parked, and you couldn't find anything even with a map.

The end result of some rearranging, storing in the attic, and $6 worth of 'organization equipment' really made a huge difference. Here is the after.

I ended up moving everything into stations. Not only did I feel it would be easier for us to keep organized, but it also reminded me of one of the DVD extras from one of our favorite shows, the Venture Brothers. In it, they describe their drawing studio in different 'stations', such as the 'rejuvenation station' and the 'relaxation station'.

We start with the left wall.

Everything is on an old bookcase that we've had out there (in the way) for a while. It really helps because you can really see which bottles are which. The second shelf down is actually holding both of our drills and the teal bin holds ALL of our bits. We have a LOT of them, so keeping them all in one place is key.

Next to the Automotive Station, we have the Gardening Station.

Which includes all of our gardening and cleaning tools finally put in an area where they aren't leaned against a corner or falling behind the lawn mower. Making this little organizer is quick and cheap, too.

I bought a pre-cut 2 ft. piece of PVC pipe from Home Depot and chopped it down into two-three inch sections. Then I took a piece of scrap wood and drilled from wood-to-pipe from the back to create a mount for the PVC. To attach it to the wall, I just used four screws and screwed the wood itself to the wall to secure it. That's it. Everything fits real well and there are no moving parts, so it won't break like some of the other garage organizers I looked at. $6 win!

Next to the Gardening Station, we have the Recreation Station.

Mountain bike, both camp packs, and our tent are hung up (into studs) and out of the way. Getting things off the floor and onto the walls was key in getting such a small area organized. It really doubles your amount of space because you can't move outward, but you can move upward. I manged to not have to buy any hooks because we had a large pack we purchased when we had a storage space in the apartment. I found most of them and was able to use them again! Huzzah!

Moving along the garage door (which I suppose could be considered the 'Importation Station'), we get to the less consonance-appropriate title of ...

Not super interesting, but it does keep it from tripping us and splintering our feet. For some reason, this was laying down next to where the car pulls in before I moved it. There is no accounting for the stupidity of our past.

As you can see a glimpse of next to the Wood and Scrap Station, we have the

We only have one (1, uno, single, solo) outlet in our garage. That's right. One. Not only that, but it's not grounded. We have a solitary outlet that only holds two prongs in our garage (where, of course, most power tools are three). So far, this has not been fun. It's on our list of things to fix (along with the rest of the house which has the same issue (except for the kitchen)), but we were waiting until maybe this summer or fall to take care of it.

Till then, we can at least charge our equipment in style. I found a bunch of brackets and boards from Scott's old Pint Night shelves (which we weren't going to use for the same purpose in the house), so I grabbed some and set up this little guy right above the outlet. This way it's at eye level so it's easily accessible, but it's also a collection station for all of the batteries for our saws and drills.

Next to the charging station is the rest of the Recreation Station. We love to camp and hike and I looove to ride my bike, so having them in the garage is a must, but like his brethren across the garage, he must be off the floor and out of the way.

See the yellow frames? That's for another project that will be showing up here soon!

I am so pleased with the result of a couple of hours work. The only part that I'm not completely ready to tackle is the big shelving unit.

We have plans for it, but they will have to wait for warmer weather. Here is the ugliest Photoshop sketch I could ever reveal to you to give a rough idea as to what we would like to do.

Those blue cabinets were actually originally in the laundry room, but I had Scott take them out because they blocked a lot of light and made the space look smaller than it already looked. We kept them, though, and are hoping to mount them (maybe this weekend?) so we can use them for additional storage (the doors can't open because they are just sitting on the shelf right now).

Then, we want to take out about half of the shelving and just have an open space next to the door. We will either use that for larger tools (a bandsaw or table saw), or possible a deep freeze I've had my eye on. Possibly just a shoe rack. Who knows. Those are all a long way off from our minds at the moment.

Once we have the shelves cut down to create a workbench and the cabinets mounted, we would like to pegboard the reachable parts of the wall so we can put things like hammers, screwdrivers, and other small tools in an organized yet reachable space. All of this would really make our lives (especially our DIY lives) much easier.

For right now, though, we are just enjoying something that we haven't had since we moved all of our stuff in: space to walk around the car with ease.

And not just one path,

We even have a tiny path on the other side of the car that doesn't involve having to jump over boxes and boards!

Yesterday was a big success on the garage-front. We are really hoping that this will help us get done with more DIY projects quicker because we know where everything is! Have you ever organized something and it just made you love the space that much more? Let me know in the comments!

"Board"

Chalkboard, that is. Unlike Sherlock, though, I don't go shooting walls.

Love him.

Instead, I decided to try out yet another pin that I had seen on The Pinterest that had caught my eye and immediately clicked with me. It involved turning the door that accesses your garage from your house into a chalkboard. This made sense on a lot of levels:

-The black paint won't show the dirty hand prints that usually adorn a white garage access door.
-The chalkboard material is easy to clean
-It's a great place to leave lists, especially for the budding DIYer

So I grabbed my can of chalkboard paint that was left over from the wedding. You don't HAVE to use pre-mixed paint, but I just happened to have it on hand.

If you don't happen to have any left over from your own bunch of previous DIY projects, you can always use this Martha Stewart recipe to create your own (in any color you wish!):

• Flat-finish latex paint (any color)
• Mixing container
• Unsanded tile grout

Pretty simple, eh? Just mix them together until you get the consistency of semi-thick paint and boom....chalkboard paint.

After I had gathered my paint, paint brush, and painter's tape, I approached my victim canvas.

Yes, our garage is a mess. Also, points for you if you noticed the X-Wing Fighter street sign before I mentioned it...

Nothing special, but it did have traces of the grimy hands that had been opening it over and over for the past (almost) two months.

Gross.

I was sure to tape off the door knob and dead bolt before starting just to make clean up easier. I also taped off the sides of the door so that I could avoid those awkward over-reaching brush strokes. After the first coat, it was obvious this was going to need more that one good slathering of paint, so I let the first coat dry to this result. Note: I used the same door painting technique outlined in my previous post.

A couple more coats, though, and we were looking good. In all, I'd say there were three coats with about 30 minutes in between. The entire project probably took me about an hour and a half.

For better lighting, I opened the outside door. Here, Sam is modeling it's low windows and abundance of squirrel interest.

This is the next day. The door was looking much better with all of the well-dried coats of paint. There was something missing, though.....chalk writing!

I decided to use this tutorial to do some fun chalkboard lettering for the eye-level portion of the door. It didn't turn out too bad (better than it would have been free handed), but I definitely need some practice.

Overall, the project was a fun way to add a little written organization to our garage, but it's also a nice surprise design element that I haven't seen on a lot of garage doors. I really like it! It helps, of course, that the first item on our list makes me think of Peter Gabriel.

Happy Monday!