Make your home the trick-or-treat hit

As Halloween creeps up on us, we are challenged with how to decorate our homes for this much-anticipated holiday.  Common Halloween imagery includes themes of death, mythical monsters, carved pumpkins, and the customary colors identified with this celebration—black, purple and orange.

Here is how to create your own haunted attraction.

Choose a fitting area in your garden or home front to recreate a graveyard scene.

You will need some carpentry skills for this DIY activity.

Cut some plywood to form an old-fashioned coffin and tombstones.  No need to nail the pieces together, use heavy duty duct tape to hold pieces in place.  When the coffin is all set, you can paint it any color you wish.  Follow this process for the tombstones or graveyard markers.

We used white paint and streaks of gray paint.  For added texture after applying the first coat of white paint, we sprinkled sand in random areas while the paint was still wet so it created texture on the surface.

For added effects, we lined the coffin with black fabric, tearing the edges of the fabric to make it look convincingly old.  Add some cotton cobwebs, and for a more eerie effect, we put a skeleton.

Let your imagination run wild to create your own scary venue.