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!