I am attempting to be formal and argue samantics, see what I did there, no? Halloween 2024 and how it’s going, I have for a change bitten off more than I can chew, another pun. This year at Capel Manor, I designed a 24m by 6m spooky house. 12m are a maze and the remaining space is 8m – 10m is for something diabolical. I designed the maze as the Spookarium and the Circus, designed by Greg is the Diabolical Circus.
We have had 2 weeks to build it with no money this year, the total bill so far is around £2000, money I have access to but not actually mine. We are getting paid for this but I have had to front this and decided that we live up to the Dread House’s description of non profit. That’s good, because there isn’t any, profit that is. It is a couple of hundred over budget. I have had a few challenges along the way, the downside being Halloween is our event and the vast majority of the kit has been purchased for, is only once a year. As a result, many of the lessons about time planning are remembered each year just before the event and not retained or recorded.
The planning and design started as always in January. The first draft of the plan, that I ended up rejecting and redesiging in February and subsequently presented to Alex at Capel manor. I started using the sketch up, 3d software and presented to them and they accepted.
The second draft isn’t that far from what we’ve built. The Spookarium is much the same, the circus has changed a lot.
Last year was had some large challenges, Greg injured his hand in a serious capacity and was unable to drive, which meant no van and half of the props wouldn’t fit in my car and ended up being left behind. It also meant that packing up was next to impossible.I ended up hiring. Van. I had the difficult task of getting our brand new 12 by 6 marquee back to my house with nowhere to store it. It ended up spending the year in my dumpsite garden under the blackout material.
Bizarrely, the whole thing survived as did a lot of the blackout material. I chose to not make the same mistake this year, having purchased a second marquee. So the Dread House has just bought a brand new shed/ store to house both set ups. This will take the strain off of my garden and give me the piece of mind that I can have my garden back and store the equipment neatly and safely until Easter, when I am hoping it will be needed.
At present, I am a day away from the start of the Halloween exhibition and there is still some work to do to finish off. I am feeling the stress of it but quietly confident that it will be 90% there on time.
Thanks for reading.
