Quick, Easy and Inexpensive Halloween Town Buildings

Every year for Christmas I set up a Christmas Village with little houses and some little people (which I kidnapped from my mother), some cotton for snow and don't forget the lights! Its probably my favorite Christmas decoration! Halloween is just around the corner and I really wanted to have some kind of village for Halloween. However, this year has been financially a frugal year I didn't have the money to just go out and buy Halloween Town sets. I also didn't have the time to build anything to complex such as little wood houses or even anything three dimensional seeing that those typically take some time and energy that I don't have since I have a one year old and I am pregnant I need all the rest I can get! So, once again, I had to come up with something quick and simple.

I found some really handy and neat looking arts and crafts on familyfun.com but I either didn't have the time to do those crafts or I didn't have the material lying around the house. (I did make one of the arts and craft projects from familyfun.com which involved milk jugs because I always have milk jugs!) Since I couldn't find anything to make a Halloween Town I decided to come up with my own idea. I knew that I had construction paper, scissors and the amazing tacky glue since I had all these things I figured I could come up with something! So I did! I came up with this little town because I am frugal and I really like decorations! That is the best part about Halloween or any other holiday!

This is just the instructions on how to make the buildings. Please read below for links to my other hubs on how to put the village up and how to make the trees as well as the floating ghosts! Enjoy! And I would love to here about more frugal decorations!

Materials:

• black construction paper
• yellow construction paper
• orange construction paper
• scissors
• tacky glue
• a ruler
• a craft knife or (what I used) a box cutter
  

To make the template for your houses:

*I prefer to make templates and just trace it so I can save the template for next year and use it again. But its up to you whether you want to make a template or just measure out each house. I would advice making a template but to each his own!

First, you will need one piece of black construction paper or some other kind of construction paper cause it doesn't matter if it is for a template. Take your ruler and find the center of the entire piece of construction paper. You will won't the paper to be vertical not horizontal when you make this measurement. Once you figure out the measurement if you are using a normal 11" by 8 1/2" piece of paper then it will be 4 1/4". Mark a dot or dash in about three place on the paper then draw a vertical line from the top of the paper to the bottom of the paper following those dots to make sure you accurately measured. This is you center line which will make all the other measurements easier to follow.

Next, measure 6 inches across with the line you just drew lining up with the 3" mark. Make marks on the paper at the 0 and 6. Then where you made the 0 and 6 dots draw a line that measures 8" vertically from the bottom of the paper. Now you have the two sides of the building. Along with the width of the building which is 6 and the center line is in the middle of the building. So basically the rectangle or base of the building is complete.

Now, connect the top of the box. Next we are making the hang over roof by simply adding 3/4" on each side of the top of the rectangle. Simple enough!

Here comes the most difficult part! This is where if you have a right angle triangle ruler you could save yourself some headaches if not its not too difficult. Just hope that you measured everything correctly or you could end up with a crooked roof. Take the ruler and line the 0 inch mark with the end of the top of the top of the rectangle where you just extended it. Now angle the ruler so that the 6" mark on the ruler reaches the top of the paper. Make sure the 0 and 6 are lined straight. Draw line then repeat on the other side. If the measurements are correct the point where the to diagonal lines meet should be the center line that you drew at the beginning of the project! If this didn't work then don't be discouraged if you are better than me you can easily free hand the roof! Also, remember if your paper is taller than normal size this could be an issue because that measurement is based on normal size paper. You can easily adjust it by just moving the ruler to line it up with the center line. (This will make the project take a little longer! Just to warn you! Cause I had to mess around with it to come up with these measurements!)

Finally, cut out the template and use it make additional houses. I simply lowed the house on the paper to make different sized houses. With the tallest house being an exact copy of the template!

The windows and doors:

To make the windows, you will need the craft knife or box cutter. Cut out 1 1/4" height by 1" width windows from the black houses that you made. I made templates for this too. I just used a piece of the scrap and measured the 1 1/4" x 1" cut that out with the scissors and then traced the template on the houses where I wanted the windows. Then I simply used the box cutter knife and cut out the windows from the house. Simple!

Next, I measured 1 1/2" height by 1 1/4" width on a yellow piece of construction paper. Once again I made a template with a piece of scrap paper and then traced the number of yellow windows I needed for each house. I then cut the windows out with scissors.

For the doors, I made the doors for each house. For the larger houses I made a double door by measuring it 2" wide.  I drew a vertical line where the 1" mark was from the 2" width. I made the vertical line 2 1/2" tall and drew the top of the door 2" wide. So each door was 1" wide and 2 1/2" tall. I only cut the middle line and the top lines leaving the doors attached so that the doors would swing. For the smaller house I only made one door which was 1" wide and 2 1/2" tall. I, also, left one side attached to allow for the swing.

Next, I cut out 2 3/4" tall and 2 1/4" wide orange piece of paper to rest behind the door. You could use yellow if you want but I liked the orange behind the door to mix it up a little bit.

Last but not least, simply place some dots of tacky glue around each windows and doors on the back side of the building and attach the yellow windows and doors that you cut out!

Simple as that! The most complicated was definitely the houses but once the templates are made the time goes by quicker! This project took me about 2 hours to make (but I did have to figure out the measurements and I messed up a couple of times) So I would still set enough time aside to complete the project!

Be creative! Feel free to adjust the dimensions of the windows, doors or buildings! I would love to hear what either worked better or was simpler! I hope if you decide to make these you will enjoy doing it as much as I did! Don't forget you can have a little helper help make these! Just be smart about what they can do! I am sure experienced crafters or non-experienced crafters can make these extremely easy buildings! Hope you enjoyed the craft as much as I did!