10 Unique Last-Minute Halloween Decorating Ideas

Halloween may be just a few days away but there's still time to do more decorating than simply carving the pumpkin you bought. Sometimes, operating with last-minute time constraints and on a low budget can lead to truly creative solutions. So while others may turn their homes into haunted mansions with the standard spider webs and leaf-filled pumpkin bags, here are 10 ways to haunt your house for little cash.

1. Local farms and garden centers are great places to shop for unusual and inexpensive decorations. Maggie Kunze, General Manager of Grant Farms in Cheyenne, Wyo., recommends giving your home a handsomely haunted look with dried corn stalks, hay bales, grapevines, Indian corn, colorful gourds and dangling chili-pepper ristras.

2. Use some of that hay to stuff old clothes and create a scarecrow. Set him up in your yard, surrounded by autumn leaves and miniature pumpkins.

3. Hit your local thrift store for a white sheet and use a black Sharpie pen to drawn a haunted face. Dangle the ghost from a tree or the front of your house and place a small electric fan under the ghost to make it flutter in the wind.

4. Carve a scowling face on your pumpkin with a wide mouth close to the bottom, then drape gooey pumpkin guts from the mouth and stream them across your porch. Voila! Puking pumpkin.

5. Create a unique spiderweb with a ball of butcher's string or white yarn by stringing it from point to point in your front yard. Your handmade spider web will be much easier to remove once the festivities have ended than store-bought webbing.

6. If you're a fiend for fashion, no doubt you have a pair of striped tights in your drawer from last season. Put them to frightful use by stuffing the legs with newspaper, adding red shoes and tucking your homemade Wicked Witch under the base of your house

7. Get a jump on your Christmas decorating and hang white lights in trees or along fences.

8. Hang black string from the top of your front-door frame to create an icky spider-web experience for trick-or-treaters.

9. Thickly trace the outline of a body on your driveway with chalk and surround it with yellow caution tape, found at many hardware stores.

10. One advantage of waiting until the last minute is that you can hit last-minute sales. Check out such stores as Michael's, AC Moore, Big Lots and your local dollar store. Don't forget some retail thrift stores now offer first-hand decorations at extreme discounts the week before a holiday.

Photos by: katiew, rbieber, itspaulkelly.

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