Rain Rain Go Away

Well our clown head is EXTREMELY close to being done. We have the whole frame attached to it, and all we are waiting on is to put it up. Yesterday Brandon and I worked all day on getting different stuff done around the haunt, the clown being one. We also worked on getting our new cemetery columns done. At the end of the day we flipped the clown head up to see what it would look like... it's HUGE!!! We put it in place in the back yard and man-o-man! This thing is huge! I was hoping the get the clown head set up in place yetserday, but with the weather being so unpredictable, we were forced to have an early night due to a large thunderstorm the just popped up.

Anyways, we were planning on adding another thing to the back yard with a pirate theme... However with the overwhelming size of the clown head, I'm afraid it was be a bit much to do both themes back there... But who knows... Things might change.

Here are some pictures of our completed clown head... Just have to do some more painting/airbrushing and it should be done!

The first picture is of the clown head laying down after the frame was built... You can see we are going to add teeth to the mouth as well. The second is of Brandon working on framing out a box for the head. We are going to make sure that this thing isn't going anywhere when the wind picks up! The final picture is of Brandon in the mouth of our clown... As you can see... It's HUGE!!! All that's left is to finish painting it and getting it staked down and anchored down as much as we can! It should be done by next week!

In other news, our 2008 construction kick off party is this weekend! We are going to be setting up our outdoor haunt on Friday and will continue to work all weekend long. People have been asking "Why are you setting up so early!?" our answer is "We are behind schedule!" We have so much planned for this year... that we need to get everything done as soon as we can! People don't realize that we don't just set up the haunted house, we have do advertise, we have to promote, and we have to do so much more than what others think. We are constantly working on the haunt year round to assure that we get everything done before our opening night!

Speaking of, I'd like to post our 2008 dates of operation. They are as follows:

• Friday October 10th - Haunt open at 7:00PM
• Saturday October 11th - Haunt open at 7:00PM
• Friday October 17th - Haunt open at 7:00PM
• Saturday October 18th - KIDS DAY 3:00PM to 6:00PM, Haunt open at 7:00PM
• Friday October 24th - Haunt open at 7:00PM
• Saturday October 25th - KIDS DAY 3:00PM to 6:00PM, Haunt open at 7:00PM
• Friday October 31st- Haunt open at 7:00PM
• Saturday November 1st - Haunt open at 7:00PM

We have no set closing time. We will remain open so long as people continue to show up so, if you want to come, come early to assure you get in! We normally close around 11 or so, but there were some instances where we closed early. If you'd like to call to assure that we are open, call Zach at (319) 269 9635.

This year is going to be our best year ever! DON'T MISS OUT!!!

Parade Photos and Update

Well we had our second parade of the season on Saturday during Waverly's Heritage Days festival. We had Ty, Dylan, Joanne, Kristyn, and myself dressed up and handing out goodies to the children. Some kids loved us, some were unsure, and some just got plain FREAKED OUT when we handed them cups and candy. However overall I believe it was a great success we handed out 6 big bags of candy, and over 1,500 Domino's cups between 3 floats. We leaded the pack, behind us was Domino's Pizza, and after that was the Overmann Plumbing float. The whole thing went great!

Here are some photos of our float. Mind you, the pictures were taken with my camera so they aren't the greatest quality!

In other news, our 12 foot tall clown head is coming right along... This thing is going to be HUGE! I'm very very excited to get the thing up and see what it looks like all done. I did some airbrush work on it last night. Got the face about done, my air compressor was getting really hot so I quit before it broke down on me! Should finish the face today, and get the rest of the head painted by the end of the week. Here are some progress pictures of my airbrush work:

We have set a date for the set up of the haunted house!!! We are going to be setting up the first of August. The outside haunt is going to be the first thing to go up. Some people ask "Why so early?" Well in order to do our best at making our sets as realistic as we possibly can, we need to start early to assure that we have enough time to put work into our sets to give it that realistic touch. Also, we have to set up in order to get a few other projects out of the garage and into the haunt to make room in our ever crowding garage!

Our 2008 haunt is coming right along! For information about how you can help, contact Zach Wiechmann at 319 269 9635. This is going to be by far our best year ever! Don't miss out on the fun!

Clown Head

A few volunteers were supposed to come help me out with finishing the front of the house, but canceled the last second so I ended up starting the clown head today... And I'm almost done! I'm going to get one more sheet of plywood tomorrow and that will be for the top of the clown head and then it will be done! I started painting what I had done tonight and should be able to finish it all up tomorrow night!

Still waiting on our makeup we ordered from Evilusions.com. I talked to the guy a week or so ago and asked why it was taking so long for it to get here, well apparently they didn't have what I ordered in stock, and they were waiting on getting a shipment of the stuff so they could send it to me. Soo... I don't think we're going to have it for our parade this weekend. (Which I was hoping for!) So we'll just end up doing masks and stuff like we did for the Shell Rock parade.

That's all for now!

Sneak Peak

Well we are well on our way with our 2008 haunt! We have started (and nearly completed!) our new facade for our outdoor haunt. It was redone for an all new layout we have planed for 08. This is just one small thing we have in store for our 08 season. Up next, we are going to be working on our 12 foot tall, 12 foot wide clown head that people will actually walk through! Yet again, just one of the many new things to expect for this year! Below are some sketches of what we are currently working on.

Here's a sketch of our 2008 house facade. The top drawing is of the framework. The bottom shows what it's going to look like after we add siding. (Click picture for larger view.)





If you remember our house from 2007 house, it had 2 windows and the door centered. Well due to our all new layout for 2008, we had to completely change the whole thing to make sure everything worked out and flowed nicely.

As I mentioned above, this is just one small thing we have in store for 2008!

This is a sketch of our new clown head we have in store for 2008. Since we've had our clown room since 2006, I figured we do an overhaul and switch everything up a bit. This is just one thing that we have planned for our all new clown room for

This still is the original inspiration for out clown head. It's from the motion picture Killer Klowns from Outer Space... One of my all time favorite horror flicks! I'm very excited for this project especially! We'll start construction this week on it!



As with the clown room, we've had some of the same rooms in the haunt for a few years. We've had our organ room, clown room, kid's room, and toxic room since 2006 and we added our bathroom, study, prison cell, funeral parlor, and Egyptian room in 2007. Well this year we plan making some updates to our rooms. Some will be retired, some will be re-done, and some rooms will be added in place of the ones we choose to get rid of. Just keep in mind that this year's haunted house is going to be far from the one you saw last year!

So It Begins!

Today we started construction... err DEstruction for our 08 haunt! Our volunteers Brandon, Kristyn, Matt, and Tanner came over around 5 to help out. We started off by taking apart our facade from 06/07. This will be replaced as will a lot of other stuff from past years! We then cleaned out the garage so we had some space to work. Took some stuff to storage and burned a lot of scrap wood from the facade. After the facade was done our four volunteers started taking out nails from some wood we were able to snag from the Digital Dog Pound here in Waverly. They did some demo and had tons of wood they were going to throw away so I snagged it before they could toss it so I got a lot of nice wood... For free!

Tomorrow I'm going to Menards to get plywood for the facade as well as some other stuff for a few more projects. One being our 8 foot tall clown head!

In other news, I got my airbrush today I got for our make up this year. IT'S FUN. I messed with it a little using some acrylic craft paint. Still waiting on my makeup I ordered. I'm hoping to have it before our next parade on the 19th.

That's all I can think of right now! I'm going to bed!
Check back tomorrow for hopefully some progress pics! We'll see!

4th of July Parade and 08 Info

Yesterday we had our first ever parade in Shell Rock during their Shell Rock Days celebration. It was great! We had our big white truck with a corpse on the roof along with our casket in the bed of the truck and we had a trailer pulled behind with "Finger Food" in her bed. The whole thing went great! We threw out candy, flavor ices, and cups from Ziggy's Domino's Pizza that had fliers about our haunt. I dressed up as my character, Lou Natic, and ran around. For the most part I played "good guy" Lou but there were a couple older kids that I had some fun with!

The whole thing went great, but MAN! am I glad it's over! I've been getting ready for the parade the last two weeks and it's just nice to know it's over! However, while we were waiting for the parade to start, a woman came up to me (I'm in full costume mind you) and handed me a flier and said "You guys need to come to this!" The flier was about Janseville Days (Janesville is a town about a 5 min drive away) and there was a list of events. She pointed out the parade which is going to take place on the 26th of July and said "We'd love to have you there! The kids will love it!" So I of course agreed and told her we'd be there!

Also, in two weeks we have the Heritage Days parade here in Waverly! So we are going to be getting a ton of much needed exposer for this year's haunt!

I would also like to share some information about our 2008 dates of operation. We will be open the weekends of the 10th, 17th, 24th and 31st of October. That's a total of eight nights (More than ever before!) and we are going to have two kids days! Our kids days will be on Saturday the 18th and Saturday the 25th from 3:00pm to 6:00pm. Last year our kids day went over amazingly so we decided that this year we were going to have two. This way, it will give more people the opportunity to come the second night if they couldn't the first.

Also, I want to make sure people realize that the haunted house isn't a little kid thing anymore (Except on our kids days obviously) But we have had a lot of parents bringing their 5, 6, 7 year old kids through. And although that is fine, we feel as though the people don't realize that the haunted house isn't intended for smaller children. So this year we plan on putting a PG-13 rating on the haunt. We will place a PG-13 logo outside the haunt as well as our posters we are going to be putting up throughout town.

Anyways, to tell you more about our kids days. We don't have it all planned out at the moment. But we are planning on having Nestle's hot coco served along with cookies provided by the local bakery. We also are planning on having balloon animals made as well as handing out some other goodies. There is talk of having pumpkin carving, but we are still up in the air about it. We will provide more information about our kids days as soon as we get everything figured out.

That's all I have for now! Now that most of our planning for our 2008 haunt is done, we will soon be starting on construction! If you are interested in helping us out please contact me, Zach Wiechman, at (319) 269 9635 or via e-mail at frontyardfright@msn.com any help is a lot of help!

Update

Well Kate wasn't able to get our site up and going just yet. We worked on it for about an hour or so but couldn't get it figured out. We even called the people form GoDaddy to help us out but still couldn't get things up and going. We'll get it... Eventually!

Also I've been getting stuff ready for our parade on the 4th. We are waiting on our 2 banners to be made that will go on the side of our truck. Yesterday I made a stand for one of my corpses so he can sit on the tailgate of the truck during the parade. We are hoping to find a trailer so we can have our casket on it, but since it's so close I am unsure of that. We will also have a few different props in the back of the truck.

I still haven't decided if I want people to dress up in costumes or not. Yes it would be great, but with the hot weather and the long distance to walk, I'm afraid some of our helpers would get too hot too fast.

Anyways, still tinkering around with a few other ideas I have for the parade. I'm trying to go all out seeing as this is our first parade!

Check back later for more details!

Getting Ready

Well tomorrow Kate Bell is going to come over to help me get our site up and going. I'm not planning on getting the whole thing up quite yet... But who knows. I just want to get something up saying "Coming Soon" or something simple. The reason is because I want to make fliers for the parade this weekend and I wanted to post the site on it. So hopefully Kate will be able to help me out there.
In other news I ordered a TON of new make up for the haunt. This year we are going to start using airbrushes rather than that nasty cake makeup. I'd also like to get away from using so many masks. They get pretty narsty after a couple nights with all the sweat and make up that get in there. I did clean out all the masks after last year but they still get pretty icky during the season.
I also bought a new prop for our library/study room in outdoor haunt. A lot of new things will be added this year! We will be adding a few small things, as well as a few large things. I don't want to say too much because I want it to be somewhat of a surprise, but who knows... I'll probably end up telling everyone as the season grows closer! :P.
That's all for now. I'm just about to start working on some fliers for the parade this weekend! Check back soon!

Kick Off Party

Well tonight was our 2008 kick off party! This year's haunt is soon to be on its way! We started off by watching the movie Killer Klowns from Outer Space... After that we ate some Domino's and waited for a few other guests who were running a bit late. But after that I shared some information about the haunt this year and what we all had planned. Also, I asked for some suggestions about some rooms I wasn't sure about. We also had a great discussion about what rooms to have in the garage this year. One of the girls there, Kendal, was giving me plenty of ideas to work with! It was great!

After our discussion we went out and sat by a fire for a little bit, until the rain kicked in again and we ended up going back into the garage. There we watched some Youtube videos and discussed some more ideas.

The whole thing went over great and I'm even more excited about the haunt this year!

Stay tuned!

Busy!

Yesterday during the day I worked on getting some of the haunted house stuff out of the garage and back into storage... And I know people are wondering why I'm doing this. Well. We had all of the haunted house stuff moved out of our storage unit and into our garage due to the flood... And since it's a little too early to set it up it needed to get out of the way. For one reason, mother wants to park in the garage as much as she can... because after August or so the haunted house will be up in the garage. And another reason for putting the walls back into storage is because we have our cast party this Saturday... and we need space for everyone to chill out in the garage.

Anyways, I was working alone for most of the day, due to everyone else having something else better to do. But around five o clock or so my friend Kendal came and helped me move the rest of the walls as well as some other stuff that we didn't need to have at the house quite yet. And after my dad got off of work we took a few more loads so the garage is just about 1/2 way empty. So, next week I'll have to finish that up.

In other news, today I talked to a few businesses around town about getting some shirts and some signs made for our parade on the 4th. I was told that I could get shirts for around 8 bucks or so and the banners I wanted are going to cost 2 arms and 3 legs. Hahahaha

I'm hoping to get our sponsors to help out with the t-shirt costs by placing their logo on the backs of the t-shirts. One gentleman I talked to about the shirts said that it would be a close call as to whether or not our shirts would be done in time for the parade... So I'm worrisome about that. Another thing is... I don't have all my sponsors sorted out yet. I know that I am keeping most of the sponsors from previous years, but I'm hoping to gain some more. So... I don't want to order the shirts too soon and exclude the sponsors I don't have lined up quite yet. We'll see how this turns up...

Have yet to get to work on a site quite yet. I e-mailed Ian from Frightmare Forest about helping me get my site up and going because he does that kind of stuff for a living, and he does a great job too! So hopefully when I get some free time, I can get a site up and going... at least with some basic information about this year's haunt...

That's all for now!

Getting Ready

Well it's about that time of the year to get back to work on the haunt. Due to the recent flood over Waverly all of our haunted house stuff was all moved to our house because it's higher up than our storage unit (Which got flooded). So at the moment all of our wall panels are in our garage as well as the rest of the stuff we have for the haunted house.

Currently we are getting ready for some up coming events we have planned. This Saturday we are going to have our first SCREAM TEAM meeting of the year. We are going to go over the layout of this year's haunt as well as share ideas about what to add, take out, and redo for the garage portion of this year's haunt. It should be a great time for everyone to meet up again, as well as introduce the new members for this year.

We also have a parade coming up on the 4th of July that we are EXTREMELY excited about! We will be joining up with Domino's Pizza and we will be handing out candy, cups, and fliers about this year's haunt. We are very very excited to actually take part in our first parade this year. It should be a great time!

In other news, we are working on getting a website up and going. The day after Halloween last year our site went down and I wasn't able to get it back up for a long time. And then our domain name expired and was bought by some ad company. So, our website is no longer www.frontyardfright.com. It is now going to be www.fourthyearoffear.com. This is obviously going to be a temporary change because I have back ordered our previous domain name (www.frontyarfright.com) for the 2009 season. So for this year, our website will be www.fourthyearoffear.com.

That's all for now. Please keep you eyes open for updates about the haunt this year. As October gets closer we will be updating more often so watch out for more info!

Lighting Machines

Well last night we got our two lightning machines we ordered a couple days ago... They are awesome! We tested them out with some lights we had around the house. One is going to be for out in the cemetery, and I'm not sure about the other yet.

In other news, we are still working on our columns for our gate. We have one framed out and waiting for plywood. Hopefully this weekend we will get both of them done. We are hoping to have them done in time for my graduation party that I'm having on May 10th. So hopefully everything goes smoothly!

Other than that not a whole lot going on! Stay tuned for more updates!

So It Starts

Well tomorrow I plan on starting our first project for 2008. We are going to be replacing our old cemetery gate that we've used for the past 2 years with 2 10 foot tall columns that will have "CEMETERY" across the top. It should be pretty cool and it will be a much needed improvement!
I am very very excited to get back to work on our haunt. It seems like forever since I've picked up a hammer!

Website

Well with the season coming up we are currently working on getting our new website up and going. We were well on our way with it a few weeks ago but due to our computer crashing we lost all of it! So we are starting from scratch (yet again) and we'll hopefully have our brand new website up and going within the next month or so.

Also, we are working on our 2008 light show that we are going to have in our front yard. In past years we have had just had plastic yard decorations but for 2008 we are going to use a computer software program called Light-O-Rama to put our lights to music. Some of the songs that we are going to use are Thriller by Michael Jackson and This is Halloween from the animated film The Nightmare Before Christmas. Here is a link to help give you an idea of what we are going to do:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=MzUTBJW6gpo&feature=related

Stay tuned to learn about this year's display!

Update

Well things for this year's haunt are at a standstill. I have been very busy with school, work, and just being a kid so I haven't gotten a chance to get to work on anything quite yet. Also, I have to wait for all of the Christmas decorations to be taken down and put up into the attic of the garage. Until that is done I can't start much of anything. And this snow that we keep getting isn't helping the cause!
I was right in the middle of working on a brand new website for 2008 but my computer crashed due to a virus of some sorts so the whole computer had to be wiped clean and yet the computer is still having problems! But no worries, I should have a new site up here in a couple months. Stay tuned to find out more about this year’s haunt!

2008 Ideas

Ever since we started our 2007 haunt I have been thinking of things to add to our 2008 haunt. Well now that 2007 is long gone, we have been playing with some of the different ideas that we have. We are going to work on adding a completely new sound system to our haunt, we are going to be replacing our cemetery gate in our cemetery, we are going to be adding a room in the house, a pirate ship with replace our scare crow post from last year, and we are going to be switching up our haunt inside the garage... So we have our work cut out for us!

We will be starting construction on some new props here in a couple weeks. Our Christmas stuff is still out in the yard due to snow, so as soon as that is down and in storage, we will begin work on our 2008 haunt!

If you are interested in helping us out take down our Christmas stuff feel free to e-mail us at . You can also check out our Wiechmann Winter Wonderland Blog for more information about our Christmas display.

Welcome!

Welcome to our new blog for 2008! Our 2007 show was FANTASTIC and we can not wait to see you all in 2008! We have a lot of things already planned for 08, and I thought that I could use this blog to keep you all updated as we progress throughout the year. Things right now are kinda slow, with it being right after Christmas, so nothing big really happening now, but in just about a month or so I believe that work will pick up!
I would like to thank all who helped us out last year with the haunt, there were many of you who really blew us away with how loyal you were with showing up! You were a great group to work with and we can't wait to see you all back for 08. If you guys want to know what's going on with the haunt be sure to check back here every week or so because I'm going to try my hardest to make sure I update this thing!
Anyways, I look forward to 2008 when we return bigger, better, and SCARIER than ever before!