31 Days of Halloween - Wooden Lightpost

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! 

Happy October, everyone! I hope you're enjoying the 31 Days of Halloween so far... today's project seemed a bit daunting to me before I did it. Once the hubs and I got to work, it came together so easily! You can find this project on my pinterest board, from an idea on a Better Homes & Gardens slideshow, found here with a template too!

We had some wood from a project that didn't work out like I'd hoped. I blogged about it here. Since the wood was the exact height I needed and I didn't want to go to the hardware store for more, we pulled it apart and got to work.

 I printed out the template from the Better Homes & Gardens website.  I enlarged it first, by 600%.  The middle of the lightpost is just a straight line, so all I needed to print out was the bottom and the top.  I just made it as tall as I wanted... easy-schmeasy.  I traced it again in black marker so it would be easier for Dave to cut it out.  Now we had the outline of the post ready to cut:

Once that was ready, Dave used his jigsaw to cut it out while I traced the top.

He cut it all out, including the second piece that will hold the lantern.  He used scrap pieces to make stakes so we could stick it in the ground securely.  After a very short time, we had all our pieces cut:

Don't the stakes look like we're planning for a vampire invasion?  Maybe we are, you just never know.  And when it goes down, we'll be ready.

We drilled the top piece and the stakes into the back of the lightpost.

Then, we stuck it into the ground for a test... if it wasn't going to stay up or it needed more work, I wanted to find out before we painted it.

Success!

I gave it a couple of coats of black spray paint (which I have a plethora of over here) and let it dry.

Once it was dry, I had the hubby stake it in the ground and we put the lantern on it.  (We got the lantern at Wal-Mart... I have an upcoming post about all the Halloween goodies there!)

If you have the right tools (a jigsaw, definitely) this project is simple! And it looks really cute in the yard!

Check in for tomorrow's post about my husband's affair with a fog machine.  It's a heartwarming love story.



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