This is Halloween…

I love Halloween.

It is really the only time of year that I am ok with all things spooky and scary. I mean, I’ll still close my eyes during trailer and commercials for the really scary movies, but that’s OK lol. Anyway, I love to decorate the house and yard with spooky décor, and this year, we up’ed our yard decorations with a 9 foot(ish) Pumpkin King! Since buying our house, I have put up the standard graveyard and zombie, but this year I went all out (and just wait until you see what I have planned for next year!)

We were originally going to put huge spiders on our roof, and a spiderwebbed tent frame to go along our driveway, but I decided I wanted to build a Pumpkin King to walk through our graveyard! I also bought a few more groundbreaking zombies to put out on the lawn, including one that “broke through” a pallet we had lying around.

I only have pictures of the built Pumpkin King, as I was too excited to take pictures during the building process, but it was a fairly easy build. We bought 3 10-foot, 2 inch diameter PVC pipes, and various bends from Home Depot, and used our miter saw to cut the pipes down to the lengths that I needed. PVC primer and cement was used to glue everything but the legs together, as we had to stake the legs into the ground first, and figured that would be easier WITHOUT a whole 9 foot body attached to them.

To be honest, staking the legs into the ground was the most difficult part.  The ground was pretty solid but my hubs was a good sport about it (and he got a great workout!).  After getting the legs in, we slid the rest of the body onto them. I will be totally honest and tell you that Mr. Pumpkin King fell down about 3 or 4 times during the month of October because of the wind and rain. Not only did all of the rain soften the ground so much that the legs were no longer properly supported, but the wind managed to lift the King off of his legs! To remedy this, we bought 3 inch diameter PVC, and fittings that went from 2 inch to 3 inch diameter, from Home Depot, and made caps so that we could slide the body onto the legs.  And for extra insurance, since the ground had softened so much, we staked him with some rope.

In addition to our Pumpkin King and zombies, I also had the GENIUS *toot toot* idea of putting a Penny Wise mask into our storm drain. Needless to say, many people stopped to take pictures of themselves with our house as their backdrop!

Let me tell you, Halloween was EPIC. It may have been a bit windy, and I was praying the whole day that the King would stay up as long as we had trick or treaters, but hearing kids walking by us (as we ourselves were trick or treating) saying “Hey, we HAVE to go to that creepy blue house!” made me feel proud.

Without further ado, pictures of our Halloween décor! (Oh, and in case anyone was wondering, the ridiculous wind and rain storm we had on Halloween night DID tear down our Pumpkin King, but at that point, I didn’t care LOL).