Spooky Savings: Affordable Halloween Decorations

It’s the spookiest time of the year and if you haven’t start already, you’ll probably be putting up Halloween decorations around your home soon. It’s always fun to transform your home into a haunted house this time of year, but since Halloween is such a limited-time holiday, it doesn’t make much sense to splurge on decorations. Here are some ways you can save on Halloween without sacrificing the spookiness of your set-up.

Spider Webs

The easiest, cheapest, yet messiest Halloween decoration is spider webs, of course. You can buy a pack of webbing and a couple of plastic spiders for as low as $2-4 at places like Target or discount Halloween stores. As a general rule, the greater quantity you buy, the cheaper it’ll cost you per-unit and if you wait until after Halloween, you can score some great deals on next year’s decorations (though you’ll have to store them with actual spider webs in the attic for the next eleven months or so).

Jack-o-Lanterns

If you live in a rural area, it should be somewhat easier to find affordable pumpkins than if you live in a suburban or urban area, where commercial pumpkin patches figure the price of transport and land rental into the price of their pumpkins. As a general rule, smaller is cheaper, but you don’t have to skimp on pumpkins entirely. Once you pick out the perfect pumpkin, all you need are some carving tools (an appropriate knife for carving will do the trick) and some newspapers to avoid getting pumpkin mush all over the ground during the carving process. As a final touch, you may want to buy small candles to include in the pumpkin’s interior; these cost less than $1 each and can be reused multiple times.

Bed Sheet Ghosts

If you have some trees in your yard, then what better what to add some haunting flair to your increasingly haunted house than some ghosts dangling from the branches? All you need is some thin white sheets (super cheap if bought by the yard at a fabric store), rope, and perhaps something to give the ghosts some shape under the sheets, such as a pillow or coat hanger.

Tombstones

Tombstones are an easy DIY project for Halloween enthusiasts. All you need is some wood (or cardboard, if you don’t have much rain in your area this time of year and can leave the tombstones out on the lawn without them getting drenched overnight), spray paint, and spikes to keep them in place (either attached to the bottom of the tombstone or behind it to provide stability). All of these supplies are easily accessible from your local hardware store such as Home Depot, but if you want some additional savings, either ask your neighbors if they have some extra wood or search around for building supply coupons in local publications or through SumoCoupon.

Creepy Dolls

If your kids have some old dolls they never play with anymore, consider adding them to your haunted house display. If the dolls hold little sentimental value, you can even dismember them or paint fake blood on their faces and either hide them behind trees in your yard or “bury” them in front of your homemade tombstones. It all depends on how creative you want to be. If the dolls are still valuable to you and/or your kids, then simply stand them up in the yard with a flashlight at their feet and voila! You get the same, creepy effect without harming the dolls.