Halloween Coffin

When we moved into the house we are living in now, there was a cedar fence in disrepair along the back of our property.  The fence was meant to divide the property from a ditch that serviced a farm to the west of us.  When the farm became houses, the ditch stopped holding water and the city attorney let the homeowners know that the easement for the ditch had lapsed and we were free to fill in the ditch and expand our yards.

I talked to our backfence neighbors, and they had a really nice fence with landscaping that went right up to it.  They didn't want to expand their yard and told me I could have it.  I watched the sun every day in the summer and found it arcs across the ditch every day.  Looks like a good place for a berry patch to me.

The fence fell down of it's own accord and I dismantled it and saved the wood, knowing I would have a use someday for the old, worm-eaten, rotted cedar, I just didn't know what.  Over the next few seasons, I filled in the ditch with what I had but it wasn't enough.  This year a friend of mine found some topsoil and had it delivered to our driveway.  I had my fifteen year old son shovel the dirt into a wheelbarrow and wheel it back to the ditch to fill it in.  I had him do it because I wanted him to understand what kind of work he'd be doing for the rest of his life if he didn't pull good grades at school.

As I was poking around on some of the Halloween sites that I haunt, I came across plans for a coffin made of fence planking.  Immediately I remembered that I happened to have alot of fence planking and went to work.  The site where I found the plans was, http://www.scarefx.com/project_coffin.html.

To do this build I selected the planks for the bottom and sides that would be durable first and rotted second.  For the top I selected planks that were rotted, worm-eaten, broken and knotted, even a little warped.  Just the way I like them.  Before I display it, I'll age the fresh cut edges of the boards with a little Raw Umber wash.  That should do the trick.

I think it turned out fairly well, and when I display it for Halloween, I'll find something to do with it, like putting one of my skeletons in it or cobwebbing it a bit.  Maybe I'll have fog and lights come out of it, who knows.

Here's some pics.



Coffin top

Knothole on the side

Rotted boards at the end