Outdoor fun

One of my favorite things to do is to decorate. Whether it be "permanent" or seasonal, I just love the planning and implementing. We put out our pumpkins, mums and cornstalks a few weeks ago, but now it's time to put out the spooky stuff!

Monkey and I spent a couple of hours playing outside today. Perfect fall weather is the best!

Because money is obviously an issue (the lack of unlimited funds can be such a downer - HA), I'm at the point in life where I create small vignettes. Over the years, I'll slowly build my supply of decorations so that I can go hog wild but for now, I think smaller.


My current favorite display area is our old wine barrel. We picked this barrel up our first year in the house to use as a rain collector to use to water our flowers. That same year, West Nile virus started to be an issue so when it got put away that fall, it stayed put away. I pulled it back out this summer, plugged up the hole we had made in the top (no standing water for those pesky mosquitoes here!), and I've used it to display flowers. I did have a pumpkin on top but it was all rotten and fallen in on itself when we got home this weekend. Our first pumpkin casualty.


My second favorite is the chair. I need to put a board in where the old seat is so that it's level, but it will do until I find the time to fix it. This chair is one of a pair I bought at a yard sale for $10 a few years ago. My plan had been to fix them up, paint them and put a new seat and use them in my kitchen (at the time, I had 70's rolling chairs at my kitchen table.. UGH). T had been threatening to burn them, so I put them in MY yard sale this summer. One sold and I was left with this. I then had the brilliant idea to put it into my flower beds. The moose antler is the last one T found while he was working summers for Irving Woodlands in college. It's been sitting next to our shed since we bought the house, so I decided to put it to use as well.

My front steps still need something. I haven't decided what will be going there, but this is what we have for now. I saw an article in Martha Stewart Living last fall about plastic skeletal pieces and covering them with glitter to make them eerie to display on glass platters and in glass cake stands. I'm not up to glitter projects with Monkey just yet, but I liked the concept. So I filled my big glass cookie jar with water, put in some food coloring and plopped in a plastic skull. I need to get more water into the skull so it sinks all the way to the bottom, but I doubt I'll find the time for that. ha ha

Also, if you notice to the right of the steps, I have an old metal milk jug. My father in law had a pair in his basement for years and he gave them to me a couple years ago. For some reason, I had it in my head to paint them white. So Trooper T sprayed them white for me. I realized quickly that white didn't work and found this great looking paint at Home Depot in Bangor when the old store was closing. Paint on clearance. Great! No. Not great. Rust-Oleum American Accents Stone paints are horrible. T complained about the coverage (if we had been smart we would have used black spray primer, but we had white on hand). And look how the paint has washed away on the top! We put them out just a couple of weeks ago. Hurricane Kyle came through and washed the new paint off! I liked the look, while it lasted. But I will not be using this paint again - ever. And at $10 a can, it should work!

Back to the spooky decor. Here is Monkey helping me bury fake skeletal bones. I found an idea in one of the many magazines I read on making fake headstones out of styrofoam coolers. I had already purchased these at the Dollar Tree, but next year, we'll make a couple more so we can make a larger "graveyard" out front.

My last little area is right in front of our side deck. I saw something similar in a magazine years ago and had ripped it out to file away in my ideas binder. It needs another punch of color but I don't currently have anything to put there. Maybe next year I'll remember to buy one extra mum. You can also see a small white spot on the front of this metal jug as well. It didn't get as horrible a beating as the one in the front of the house, though.

We're hoping for another wonderful day on Thursday so we can make a scarecrow or 2 (or a family of them, if I'm really ambitious). We also need to make and hang a few (or bunch) of ghosts from the trees out front.

This weekend, we attack the interior Halloween decorating. Should be fun. I have a project for making cheese cloth ghosts with a sugar and water "glue" that I plan to let Monkey get messy with.

*mental note - don't wash kitchen floor until the ghosts are made*