Okay, so real talk. I love my officer. But his salary isn't quite up there enough to quit my job and be a full time home maker that spends her days decorating the family house to look like Turtle Creek Lane every holiday.
(Which side note, if you don't follow her on Instagram, get over there and do it NOW, you will not regret it, but your wallet might)
Anyway, it's not a luxury that I, or many law enforcement wives can probably afford. But I grew up with a mom that is just one step below Jennifer Houghton. It started with our house winning the "Best Christmas Display" for the neighborhood so many time that they just stopped doing it. The inside of our house was always decorated according to the season, and honestly, I loved it. Over the years my mom has gone from just seasonal dishes and centerpieces, to decorating the outside of the house for the different Holidays as well.
Obviously I moved out and started trying to make our new little duplex a home, well call it Little Blue from now on, I knew it was my turn to prepare to continue those traditions for my new family. I moved into Little Blue in August, and immediately got to work on Halloween. Lately my parents have been covering their house, which we'll call the Cobblestone Castle, with large spiders, hanging ghosts and clowns, large motion sensor skulls. The inside is full of witches and black cats...you get the idea. And don't get me wrong, I could go CRAZY in Hobby Lobby and Lowes and Walmart and make my little place a mini Turtle Creek Lane or Cobblestone Castle, if my bank account allowed me.
So this year, I set out to decorate for my first Holiday, on a mega budget. Now before you think, yeah but you're clearly artistic and creative and great at DIY stuff and I could never do that. STOP. I am SOOOO not that person. My mom is...100%. She see's something on Pinterest and she makes it a week later. Me, not so much. I have a short attention span, like instant gratification and just am not creative away from Photoshop.
What to do...What to do...What to do?
First stop, was Pinterest. Where I looked up some Nightmare themed Halloween décor. My favorite thing seemed to be the window silhouettes. These are the examples I saved in my phone:
So I am not above admitting that I could have done these 100% easier and faster if I would have just reached out to my mom and used her Silhouette Machine. So for those of you that have one, this is such an easy and quick but super cute idea. There are plenty of people on Etsy that even sell the designs in different sizes, ready to cut. No cutting machine? Etsy vendors also sell the precut decals so you can get the look at a pretty reasonable price!
I, on the other hand, went the complicated *read cheaper* route and bought about 10 pieces of black poster board from Walmart for this one. The poster board was under a dollar a sheet. You could probably get away with using bulletin board paper that you can buy on a roll, but nowhere around me had it. I also liked how the poster board is slightly thicker and holds its shape. I freehanded the designs with a white colored pencil and any mistakes are easily erasable with just a regular eraser. This year, I used scissors to cut it out, but realized that using a precision knife/blade would make this 100000x easier.
To get the orange glow behind the, it's just orange plastic table cloth. I got mine from the party isle at Walmart. Sometimes you can get lucky and find them at Dollar Tree, but my local dollar tree was out. The ones at Walmart were only about 25 cents more and honestly they were a thicker and better quality in my opinion. I started by assembling the poster board how I wanted and taped them in the window with clear tape. Next, I ended up tacking the orange sheets up with thumb tacks since my walls didn't seem to hold the tape very well. Add a little "back light" and you have yourself some awesome and cheap custom Halloween decorations.
Now you may be noticing my front door...I was JUST about to get to that. I'm not sure if I would recommend what I did as an "easy" way to get a cute front door, but it definitely was cheap...cheap as trash. (I know that's not a saying but just go along with it)
This door truly is my pièce de résistance. The white Jack Skellington door is a MUST for Nightmare fans. I live in the Midwest, so that means I had to find a way to recreate what I found on Pinterest, that could stand up to the rain and wind. Easiest way to do it? Poster board, construction paper, etc. How did I do it? Black trash bags. I wish I was kidding, but I accidentally bought the wrong size trash bags for my kitchen trash can so I have a TON of black trash bags laying around. They're weatherproof and can stand up to the rain, so I figured...why not? Like the window silhouettes, I freehanded his whole face out of, I believe two trash bags and then taped it all to the door. From far away, it looked adorable. Not trying to toot my own horn, but it totally tied the outside of the house together. This is a great idea for garage doors too!
So overall, the outside decorations for my house weren't absolutely breathtaking this year, but next to my neighbor that decorated with the entire isle at Dollar Tree (not even kidding) it looked super fun and creative! And I bet I spent less on my decorations than she did! I spent one afternoon making all of this, so it wasn't even very time consuming either. I would recommend measuring your windows and rough sketching up how you want things to fit. I had to work with some kind of weird split windows, but after drawing it out, figured out that making two pieces per window would be easier and look just as good.
Hopefully next year, I'll look back and think of how cute everything was this year and how modest it was compared to what I get to do in the future.
Budget doesn't have to mean boring when it comes to decorating for the holidays!
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