Fun Tips for Turning Your Garage into a Halloween Experience

Halloween is a great time for cleaning-up and organizing the garage and turning it into a Halloween fun and excitement center. In most homes, the garage is situated at the front of the house, making it the perfect location for spooky decorations, holiday artwork, and games for trick-or-treaters.

Opening up the door and turning the whole garage into a haunted house, macabre gallery of horror, or festive pumpkin and autumn display can make your house a popular stop for trick-or-treaters and the buzz among neighbors.

Start By Cleaning Up Your Garage and Garage Door

Besides being fun, turning your garage into a Halloween extravaganza is a perfect opportunity for organizing and cleaning up this space. Put tools and supplies away in cabinets or on shelves. Get bikes, lawnmowers, and other equipment organized and away from the middle of the floor. Clean the garage door with some mild detergent and a soft scrub brush followed by a thorough dowsing with a garden hose.

If you are going to open up the garage and decorate the space inside, cover shelves and objects with old sheets, traps, or carpeting to conceal them while you build your Halloween fantasy world. Collect materials like cardboard boxes, black and orange duct tape, black plastic garbage bags, spray paint, red food coloring, and old shirts, pants, and dresses for making decorations like tombstones, giant spider web designs, and scary-looking witches, goblins, and corpses.

Halloween Garage Decoration Ideas

Here are some more ideas for turning your garage or garage door into an exciting and fun Halloween creation.

• Use the closed garage door as a giant canvas for a Halloween design. Draw spider webs, spiders, and witches’ silhouettes using black and colored duct tape, black light hairspray, and cut up black plastic garbage bags. Or, turn your garage door into a festive painting of pumpkins and harvest cornucopias with non-toxic watercolors or colored chalk.
• Open up the door and make the entire doorway opening into a huge and menacing mouth by outlining the edge of the door frame with strings of small, colored lights. Then paint eyes and a nose above the center of the door with washable watercolors.
• Stuff some jeans with old cloth or newspaper, tie some old sneakers on the bottom of the legs, and close the garage door on the unfortunate dummy victim with the legs hanging outside the door. You will have to close the door manually if your automatic reopening safety device is working. (If it’s not working, be sure to get it fixed!)
• Cover a table with inexpensive toy spiders, snakes, skeletons, and a variety of plastic creepy-crawlers from the toy store. Put candy and real treats in one bucket and cooked spaghetti or wet sponges in another, place a towel over each bucket and invite trick-or-treaters to grab something from each.
• Use a black light, strobe lamp, or colored light bulbs to create a weird, spooky, or inviting light effect. Blue colored light makes a space look more abandoned. Green lighting is perfect for a mad-scientist’s lab. The glow from an orange tinted bulb adds the cheerful feeling of an autumn harvest.
• Other props for creating the right Halloween effect in your garage are old lamp stands, broken mirrors and furniture, sheets hung to resemble ghosts, dead flowers, hanging plastic bats and skeletons, and fake blood. You might even have some of these items lying around in your garage already!
• Set up a sound system with spooky music and sound effects or funny songs like Monster Mash, The Ghostbusters Theme Song, and Michael Jackson’s Thriller.
• Use a fog machine or buckets of dry ice to create waves of mist and an air of mystery inside your Halloween garage.
• If you don’t like scary, make your garage into a warm and inviting place for trick-or-treaters and their parents to enjoy a warm cup of cider and simple Halloween games like bobbing for apples, pumpkin bowling, or pin-the-boo on the ghost.

Is Your Garage Door Ready for Halloween?

Sprucing up and decorating your garage for Halloween is also a perfect time for calling in your garage door specialist to make sure the door is safe and functional before the fun begins. Have your garage door inspected and serviced soon, and have a safe and fun Halloween with your family!