Are you looking to make your home into a haunted house for the fall season? That’s a great way to bring in some extra revenue, and much of it can be passive. You could do an active house if you wanted to be involved and jump out at people or give them a scary tour. Or you can just set up the house with decorations and automated scares and leave them to find their way through.
What are you going to need to make your home ready to be haunted? You may know a few of the basics, but we want to tell you about some of the tasks that you might not have thought about.
Clean It Well
Start with a thorough cleaning of the house, as much of a deep cleaning as you can do. There are a few reasons we highly recommend that you do this. First of all, you want your home to be neat and presentable. Keeping it clean will help to attract people and make it feel welcoming.
Secondly, you will have an easier time putting up decorations and preparing your house if it is cleaned. You can get tape to stick to the counters and walls easier, and you can decorate with fewer hindrances in the way. It is always easier to work with a clean house.
Thirdly, a clean house will ensure that there are no foul odors that could make a visit to your home unpleasant. You want to control the scents in your haunted house, ensuring that only the ones you want to be there are present. By cleaning your home, you will get the smells under control and make certain that your home has the kind of environment that would be conducive to a haunted house.
Cleaning your home up is the very first step in preparing it to become a haunted house, but the job might be bigger than you expect. It could be a good idea to call in professional cleaners to do it so you can do all the other tasks necessary for setting up your home.
Remove Unnecessary Items
You are going to need space for all of your decorations and haunted items. Your house is probably filled with furniture and other items you use every day, but that will need to change if you are going to make the space into a haunted house. Figure out which rooms you will use for the attraction and make sure those are as clear as possible.
Some furniture may be able to stay. You might want to leave some tables, for example, to place candles on or severed heads. You could leave a couch and prop up a dead body there. But look at each room carefully and consider what could be used for your haunted house and what needs to go.
The unnecessary items can be sorted into rooms that won’t be used in the attraction or even moved out to someone else’s house. The more space you have to work with, the more people you can have in your home at once and the more you can do with your haunted home.
Break Up the Rooms
Large rooms are a boon to haunted house builders. You can break these rooms down into smaller spaces, creating twisting paths through them that give your visitors more bang for their buck.
For instance, a large entry room can be constricted to a small entry space that winds around and creates a twisting path for visitors to walk through. Think about how you might want to divide up rooms so that you can make the best use of space.
Consider whether you want to make constricting spaces or wide open ones. You probably want a mix of both so that your haunted house feels varied and doesn’t suffer from the problem of having identical feeling spaces.
Draw Up a Plan
Should you go buy supplies first or make up a plan for each room? That will depend partly on your budget, but we recommend mapping out the room setup first of all. That will give you an idea of what to shop for, so you are not wasting trips and so you can make the most of each shopping outing.
Figure out what kind of decorations you want in each room and how you want them set up. Then, break down the total decoration plan by item so you can buy all you need at the same time.
It is a good idea to buy more than you think you will need, especially when it comes to decorations like cobwebs, dark sheets, candles, and other décor that will be spread across multiple rooms.
Your plan can always be modified later on, but having a plan to begin with will help you begin to take action. You will feel like you have purpose when you go out to buy things.
Get Everyone on the Same Page
While you have your home set up as a haunted house, you may have to do things differently. You should let friends, neighbors and family members know what you are doing so that they won’t impose. You don’t want customers going through the haunted house and then be interrupted by a neighbor who needs to borrow something from you.
You may have to change up your work schedule and keep the house locked when it is not in use, all so you can ensure that the haunted house is kept safe and undisturbed and to ensure that it is a big success.
Your family will have to be in agreement about the haunted house, because anyone living there will be inconvenienced. You may want to make an arrangement with your spouse or kids that they will get a cut of the money if they sacrifice their rooms and their time to make the attraction a success. See if you can rope them in to helping set everything up and running it so they can feel like they are part of the process and not just being inconvenienced.