31 Days of Halloween - Cemetery Fence

If you're enjoying my Halloween posts, be sure to follow with GFC or Facebook... I'm doing another 31 Days of Halloween series this year! 

It's day two of the "31 Days of Halloween" series. I'm already exhausted. Who's hare-brained idea was this, anyway?

Yes, I know it was mine. But couldn't one of you take the blame for it? It would help me cope.

Yesterday, I showed you how to make some gravestones for your spooky Halloween yard. Today, I'm going to show you how to make a fence for your graveyard! It takes some time, but is actually really easy, and doesn't cost that much. Here's what you do:

Find some PVC pipe at Lowe's. I used the 1/2" size PVC pipe and it's $0.98 for a 10' length. I love a deal.

I sketched out my plan for the fence and decided on having the PVC cut in lengths of 30", 32", 34" and 36".  For a four-foot section of fence, you'll need two of each size.

Oh, and Lowe's has a handy-dandy cutter that they use to cut these for you.  Awesomesauce.  Here's Jen from Lowe's, happily cutting away:

She may not have really been happy, but she seemed like she was.

After purchasing your super-cheap fencing, head on home.  You'll need some black spray paint and a very high-tech method for painting.  My high-tech method involved a tarp and some dowels and sticks.  Totally modern.

I put the tarp down and stuck the dowels and sticks in the holes.  The idea was to have the sticks standing up to be painted.  Otherwise, I would have had to paint them on the ground and would have had to do one side at a time... ridiculousness.

My son took this picture.  I cropped out my rump.  This is a family blog, after all.

You'll have eight painted sticks.  Beautiful.

Once the sticks are dry, haul 'em inside.  To put them in a fence, I found this hardboard at Home Depot.  It's sort of like the cardboard backing that comes with those bookcases that you put together yourself, but a bit more firm.  It's around $5 to buy and is 48" x 24".  I had the hubster cut it into 2" strips, so I was able to get 12 strips from one sheet, which makes 6 four-foot sections.  Was that confusing? Let the pictures do the talking, Priscilla.

See? A two-inch strip of hardboard.  I had my husband also drill holes into it, 6" apart.  Then, I just put the sticks in, one on top and one on the bottom.

Make sure you do this on an unmopped floor. If I see that your floor is mopped, I'll feel inferior and you wouldn't want me to feel that way, would you?

At the bottom of the fence, I put the strip six inches up.  Then, I hot glued it on both sides.

See how goopy it looks? That's actually a good thing.  When you give it a final spray painting, it looks like real welding. Super-duper.

At the top, I made the lengths different.  For the tallest sticks, I glued at 9" down, and decreased by 2" for each of the shorter sticks.  Still confusing? Pictures speak better than I do, evidently.

Do you see at the bottom of the picture, how the sticks are staggered in length? There you go.  I gave them another coat of spray paint to darken the strips of hardboard.

While that was drying, I went inside to make some finials.

If I went with 3/4" PVC, I could have bought awesome finials online.  But what fun would that be?  None, I say.  So I found a fleur de lis on clip art and printed it out.

I cut the shape out, and traced it onto foam board.  Then I used my craft knives to carve them out.  This took some time, but I had to finish that last season of Roseanne on Netflix anyway.

You'll know you have enough when your fingers are sufficiently blistered.

I made them a bit tougher with toothpicks.  Small dowels would have been way better, but I didn't want to get out of my pajamas to go to the store.  I know, pathetic.

I hot glued them to the tops of the fence.  Easy-peasy.

Here's a peek of it in the yard.

It will look amazing with the gravestones behind it... and you'll see the final reveal on Halloween!



Linking up to...