Thread: So I'm thinking about doing a walkthrough...

Tweet

in my garage this year for Halloween. I've had the front yard decked out pretty good the last three years but I'm running out of space with all my props. I thought it would also be a good treat for all the kids as well. Can someone help me out with some ideas on how to do a walkthrough in the garage. How to cover the garage and some ideas on how to arange it. Thanks!

I am also looking to do something like this. The plan is to get black sheets (if I can find a good deal) and hang them from my rafters. I will do my best to describe how im going to do it.

From left to right I am going to run sheets to split the front and back of the garage in half. Then on the front side of this I am going to split the middle with sheets so that I have a left and right area. The right front area will just be a display that is visible from the drive way. The left side will be the entrance with some small display. From here they will enter the back half (the sheets spanning left to right will have a small entry way through it). So on the back side they will walk by the mad scientists laboratory, heading to the right where my door to the back yard is.

At that point I am cutting PVC poles, painting black, mounting my foam built skulls on top of each and drilling holes for rope. These poles will run both sides of the walk way spread about 20 feet apart with rope connecting them all. Hopefully this keeps the TOTs from walking off the path. Path will lead around the back of the house and up to the front where the front door is.

The idea here is that when a TOT comes up my drive way, they have an option to go straight and head into the garage on the haunted trail walk, or just head to the front door if they are to scared.

This is Terra's design. Halloween Forum - Terra's Album: Miscellaneous pictures II - Picture I know there is a thread with pictures of how she hung the fabric and I believe she actually used landscaping weed repelling fabric. It is cheap and not shinny. You might want to do a search or just PM her for the information I know she would be happy to answer any questions as she has done for me.

Sure, I'd love to answer questions about this. It worked out very well for me and I was amazed at the space I ended up with. Here's a video of the haunt (kind of boring, but you get a good idea of the length of the haunt):

YouTube - Halloween 2008

Here's a short video of one of the rooms that shows how I hung the landscape fabric:

YouTube - Sneak Peek Halloween 2008 - Spider Room

Here's the layout. It's a 3-car garage that gave me four rooms: Spider room, forest room, dot room and bat/vampire room:



Additional pictures:

Landscape fabric! Thank you Terra! I have been debating how I was going to get enough black cloth without paying a ton for it. Landscape fabric sounds like a great solution to this.

Originally Posted by Bubbels

Landscape fabric! Thank you Terra! I have been debating how I was going to get enough black cloth without paying a ton for it. Landscape fabric sounds like a great solution to this.

Oh yeah, worked great for me. I found a large landscape supplier who had rolls of the kind of fabric I liked (non-woven, black). It is made by Dewitt and it's called Weed Barrier Pro. The roll I ended up using was a 6 foot wide, 300 foot long one and it cost $180. The roll gave me enough fabric to do all the hanging walls, the walls that covered the open garage doors and a few of the inside walls to give it a more black-out vibe and I still had some left over (not a lot but some).

Here's a few tips: The fabric is light as air so you will need to secure the bottom of them (these were mounted with the garage doors open). Outdoors, for certain, they would need to be secured. What I did was get 8 foot 2 X 2's and stapled the bottom of the fabric to them and then rolled it up taut. Then I used 2 cement blocks per wall segment to hold it down. I used large bobbi pins to close up the wall seams. For you, if you have the ground underneath it, you could use tree stakes.

These walls were mounted with the garage doors open. For the walls that were under the open garage doors I found areas in the suspended garage door that I could attach a zip tie to and hung the walls from that. For the garage door opening walls, I had hooks mounted on the walls above the garage door and hung the fabric from that.

By the way, this stuff was great to add more elements to it. In the spider room, I bobbi-pinned shredded cheesecloth to give a spider web feel to it. In the forest room, I hung camouflage netting from the ceiling hooks alongside the landscape fabric. Then I layered on rope and jute netting. In the dot room, I sprayed-painted white dots on it and then went over it again with black-light paint. In the vampire/bat room I layered on jute netting.

After Halloween, it was as simple as unhooking the walls from the ceiling and rolling it up (layered effects and all). Next year, I think it will take me all of a half hour to put my wall-rigging.

Sorry for all the information but last year, I didn't see this idea and all this info would have really saved me a lot of research. So anyways....

That's a great idea, landscaping fabric...I wish I'd thought of that before getting a bunch of black poly sheeting. It's too reflective, and I had to position my lights so they didn't shine back on certain props, like a glass sheet for a pepper's ghost.