Hamilton Manor

Eleven days to Halloween and I am strangely calm about the state of our yard haunt. Is experience getting the better of my worry or has complacency won?

I'm not sure, but either way this season's setup is definitely not making me crazy. Here is the planned layout for this year.

We have been doing our haunt for four years and I guess I'm a little more secure in where things should go and where they shouldn't. I think I'm a little smarter about the gotchas and what isn't worth worrying about. Perhaps it's the lack of money this year. We are certainly feeling the pinch as are so many others and I am spending far less on new things.

This past weekend I worked on my new skull pathlights. They are cosmetically complete. Now I need to attach their cylinders ( they are going to simply pop-up ).

Most of the boardwalk is finished. I ran out of lumber Sunday afternoon and wasn't up for a trip to the hardware store ( read: I'd had a few beers ! ). It's coming along nicely and seems quite strong and stable. I do worry about kids falling off and may have to engineer real railings for it.

While painting the skulls I was inspired to dry brush the black fencing with some of the off-white skull paint and am really pleased with the results. Don't know why I never did that before. The fence pops out so much more at night with the dry brushing.

Got the voiceover done for the talking-skull-pointing-guy. I'm happy with it. Here it is if you'd like to hear it.

Finally, Sunday afternoon I got all my dorp hung. The last thing I played with was a piece of beef netting. I'm new to haunting with beef netting and had no idea what I was doing. How the heck do you use the stuff?! I stretched one 3 foot piece on the fence and I think it looks okay, but I spent 15 minutes dinking with it. There must be a better way!

The to-do list is formidable, but I remain undaunted.

• build a mirror frame
• build new exit gate
• build a few new tombstones
• test all air hoses and pneumatics
• build pointing-talking-skull guy
• setup magic mirror
• rebuild and setup drop panel
• rebuild air cannon and install in left pillar

Lackadaisical? Naive? Foolish?

Probably a bit of both, but the next 11 days will tell for sure.

Comments and questions encouraged...

Cheers!
Push E.