Skull Room Shelves

The first room of our Haunt won't have a scare, it will be set up like a den or library but it needed shelves. Unfortunately we join the build when its almost completed but I think you'll get the idea. This year we decided to use recycled fence panels for walls and in some areas even as roofing, this room is under a 20x20' portable carport with a plastic tarp roof, you can see on the walls where we used spare pickets to "finish" the wall to meet the roof line, giving us a decrepit shack look with high ceilings.

There is a show on cable called "Hanging with Hackett" were the guy creates amazing stuff from found objects he calls obtainium, that's a FANTASTIC word and I quickly adopted it, I also came up with the word possibilium to cover the same found,scavenged, recycled,donated materials these shelves are built from possibilium, so one of the first steps is to peruse your pile of possibilium. We went through the piles and pulled out various lengths of 2x12, 2x10", 2x6 and 2x2. You can get by with a hammer, saw and power screwdriver but thanks to my sons,  master carpenter, father in law and his mobile workshop we had everything from a cutoff wheel and grinder for removing nails to a chopsaw and air nailguns.

Building in place with materials on hand means a lot of measuring and sometimes just holding a board up to see if it will fit or work but the basics of the shelves are simple. for the bottom 2x12' shelf we attached lengths of 2x2 to the fence/wall at a height that seemed right and cut several 2x2"s as legs for the front and nailed on the wide plank then,(a) Cut 6 pieces of 2x2" into 9 3/4 lengths and 3 into 9' lengths and make 3 upside down u shapes and place them on the bottom shelf, (b) toenailing into the bottom shelf and then laying the 2x10" plank on top,adjusting the lengths and repeating the repeating a and b until all your shelves are up. As simple as this is, it was a lot more difficult to get slipshod looking shelves from someone who works in extreme high dollar mansions for a living " NO WAIT! (insert saw sound) you could have left the rough/angled end on ! " Really it's ok the shelves aren't the same length" Oh well, what would have taken me most of the day he had done in just over an hour, including setting up, cleaning up and everything back in its custom built area of the trailer. He even threw in a really cool door latch in about 15 minutes !

NO, I'm not going to show you the totally decorated scene (because it's still being worked on!) but this pic will give you an idea where it's going...

Watch for my full Haunted House "ible" around All Hallo's Eve

Happy HALLOWEEN !