How to Create a Stone Wall Facade for Your Halloween Haunted House

For many years with the help of other family members, I put on a haunted house in our garage for the grandkids during Halloween. Three years ago after my daughter moved to a neighborhood full of children, we moved it to her garage. The neighborhood children (as well as many of the parents) love it! This year my daughter-in-law, who is now my biggest helper, and I determined we wanted to do a facade for the front of the garage. I had some huge boxes from some furniture we recently purchased that I saved just for this use. If you want to try this project and don't have the cardboard on hand, call or visit your local furniture store before you need them and likely they will be willing to save some for you. We made our facade a stone wall but you can certainly change it to something that works for you!

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Things You’ll Need:

• Large pieces of heavy cardboard or card board boxes flattened and trimmed
• Paint- at least 2 or 3 colors. Left over house paint works well! Mix them to make more colors!
• 2-3 Paint brushes in varying sizes
• sponges or wadded paper or clothe to use for sponging "moss" onto "stones"
• Smaller wire to fasten piece of cardboard together as needed.
• Heavy wire to wire the facade in place
• Room to work such as the inside of a garage or other protected area
• Imagination
• A couple of hours or more and a day or 2 to allot for drying time and construction.

1. Determine how large your wall needs to be in order to cover the entire front of the garage or other opening. You need some idea of how your haunted house will work in order to determine if you need doors in the walls and where they will need to be placed in the wall. For instance, some garages may have a door or even two that you can use as an entrance and exit. Others may have no doors. You also need to determine the layout of your haunted house. Make a drawing of the finished wall with measurements included to use as a reference.
2. It is going to be hard, if not impossible to find one piece of cardboard to cover an entire garage door opening, so plan to attach the pieces together with wire or some other way that works for you. Decide which pieces will work best where.
3. Use the plain side of the cardboard as your canvas. With slightly watered down paint and a light hand, begin with large stone shapes using two or more colors. Muted browns, grays, reds and yellows work well. Do not use a heavy hand or a heavy coat of paint. A light coat works far better and dries much faster. Use loose shapes. Leave plenty of room between the stones for the mortar to show through. If possible, look at a stone wall or print a picture off the internet to use as a reference. Just make sure you paint large stones and loose shapes. Do not be too meticulous; again, you are looking to give the idea of a stone wall, not perfection!
4. Using the same technique, paint in the mortar color, preferably a grey or light brown. This will be the base color for your mortar. You just want the essence of the background color.
   
   If you have some muted green or yellow color paint use that to sponge or dab some moss onto some of the stones.
5. Decide what direction the light will be coming from. Use black to line the bottom and one side of the stones for shadow and added depth. Again, use loose strokes and a light hand. Do not try to trace or outline each stone. Vary the thickness of your strokes to add more realism to the wall. Add some highlights and shadows to the stones and mortar. Go lightly and stand back from your wall to get an idea of how it looks and where you may need to add some light detail.
6. Cut doors for your entrance and exit. You can cut a hole and hang a sheet of black plastic or other material to use as a doorway or you can cut the top and bottom of the door and then score one side the cardboard with out cutting through to form a hinge. Attach a piece of wood or other object to use as a doorknob.
7. Do not attach the door to the garage opening until you are ready to open the haunted house. This wall is only for temporary use and will not stand indefinitely, especially in damp weather. Attach the wall to the metal track and other hardware near the opening using wire. (Remember after the big night, you must remove ALL wire and other items from the working parts of your garage door. These items may cause damage to the mechanical parts when you go to use your garage door again.) We also made square or rectangular pillars to help support our wall by scoring large sheets of cardboard to form the corners or the pillars. We wired the last corner together to form the pillar and then wired the pillars to the front of the wall after we attached to wall to the garage opening.
   Cover the back of the wall with plastic sheeting, cloth or a light coat of dark paint. Add props after hanging.

Tips & Warnings

• Remember have fun and don’t be too serious about what you are doing. It’s a pretend wall and it will likely be dark anyway! Also I cannot stress enough how much better a light hand and heart works when doing a project such as this!
• Do not forget to remove all that wire from your garage door mechanism ASAP!
• Make sure no one is able to attempt to open or close the garage door while the wall is in place!