Easy Walls

Walls

I don't know about you, but I think one of the most important things for a realistic haunt is the walls (the other important things being sound and light). I was really disappointed with the walls of our last haunted house, which were black plastic hung from the ceiling. Not real looking at all, and no sound blocking ability. This past year we used carpet tubes to frame the walls, and cardboard and paper mache for the wall panels, and we are very happy with the results. The walls did a good job isolating sound, so each room could have it's on theme music. The walls were sealed with polyurethane, and were surprisingly sturdy and easy to work with.

The first thing I built was a prototype to see how that looked.

	First cut 'stones' that will fit the wall, leaving gaps for the mortar joints. For the backing, build up 2 or 3 layers of cardboard, alternating the direction of the perforations, glued together with contact cement.
	Cut some smaller pieces for texture and add to the bricks.
	Paper mache with newspaper strips in the joints and around the edges, keeping the edges nice and clean so adjoining panels fit together nicely. When the mache is dry, paint the joints black.
	Paint the rest a base coat of some dark color. Though I didn't do it on this section, for the real wall I plan on 2 coats of polyurethane at this stage. I have found using cardboard in other props that the poly seals the cardboard, which ends up far more rigid.
	Dry brush on lighter color. This shows a quick coat with gray which I was rather sloppy with. Additional colors dry brushed / splattered on would help. I like the results in the upper and lower left stones, without all the small pieces added. I also like the stones that are basically the same size, unlike the one in the lower right. I learned lots doing the prototype, plan on moving forward with this idea for real.

Now on to building the walls for the haunt.

	Started with a pile of broken down appliance boxes, on the order 200+ boxes. Get refrigerator boxes if you can. I new I would be cutting hundreds of panels, so I built a jig out of 2x4s and a couple of ceiling mains that would help me to quickly cut panels that were square, and a constant width. I settled 26" so I could get the most use out of the boxes we got, you need to determine the best width for your case. The key to the jig is that the edge of the grid is barely outside the edge of the wood, so it is easy to run a utility knife along the edge of the grid and get a nice clean cut. The grid is square, and hinged on one side.
	First step is t get a clean edge on one side of each cardboard panel. Lay the cardboard panels in the jig, eyeball it to get it close to square and cut a clean. Make panels with a clean edge with the grain and against the grain. In the final panels the cardboard will be glued with the grains alternating.
	Now add a fence at 2'2", the width of my wall panels. Now it is an easy matter to place the clean edge against the fence and cut, giving an 2'2" wide piece. Then slide it to either end to trim the edges, resulting in a piece with all for sides in square.
	Most of my walls need to be 9'5". The panels are 2 pieces of cardboard thick, and glued with contact cement. Lay the first layer of panels down with the corrugation running in one direction, then glue the next layer on the first with the corrugation going 90 degrees from the first. Be careful with the panels, they will not be rigid until sealed. The contact cement worked good but takes a lot of cement, so I bought a gallon of Elmer's glue and used that instead. I took about 1 1/2 gallons to do around 90 panels. The final step is to paper mache the edges so the panels are sealed. The picture on the left shows 11 completed panels drying.
	When you have a lot of paper mache to do, you find efficient ways to do it. I used a sheetrock finishing tray, and cooked up a batch of paper mache I would pour a little mache mix in the tray, then place strips in 2 or 3 at a time. Push the strips under the mix and against the strips already in the tray using the brush.
	Continue until you have used all the mix. You will end up with a big chunk of paper mache ready to peel off and place. This really goes fast this way.
	I made 4 types of walls. The main one was brick wall made by gluing 1 or 2 pieces of cardboard to the panel, leaving a space like a mortar joint. Then come back and mache everywhere there is an open edge to the cardboard, this will be around the edged and along all mortar joints. The walls under the paper mache prep above are brick walls ready for mache, the finished walls can be seen below.
	The second wall was a skull wall. I found the skull plaque at Big Lots, and made several mache castes of it. I then glued these to a panel, and mached all the joints.
	Third walls where bone walls. I made mache castes of a bag of bones from ACC, then cut the castes off at various angles. These castes where painted with UV reactive paint and glued to black painted panels.
	The final wall was made to look like wood panel with wall paper. Cardboard was used to make the raised panels, and all edges were mached. The wall paper print was sized so 4 would fit the panel (in my case the panels where 26"wide), and these where pasted onto the top half of the panel with watered down elmers glue. Click thumbnail to get the 6.5" wide tile, 4 will span a 2'2" panel. This wallpaper came from http://www.labs.net/anaiselise/house/ Thanks!
	Time to set up. The picture to the left shows the corner that will turn into part of the haunted house.
	The walls where framed by mounting 1x2s to the ceiling, and securing them to the floor with pieces of double sided tape. I found small clips at home depot that clip onto the ceiling grid, with a tab on the bottom with a hole. They where made for hanging things from the ceiling, and where perfect for holding the top 1x2s. Then the carpet tubes were cut to fit, and secured to the 1x2's with screws. The tubes where cut so they where tight between the top and bottom 1x2's, this kept the bottom from slipping out.
	Tubes where framed so the edges of the wall panels lined up with the tubes, then the panels where fastened to the tubes with screws.
	The 'outside of the haunted house where the brick walls. The panels ended up getting painted 2 different colors, and we had to go back and blend. Then sponged on some gray.
	Brick walls where also used as the entrance from the swamp room into the entrance hall of the haunted house. This room had a low wooden ceiling, so we where able to screw the tops of the tube directly into the ceiling.
	The entrance hall had the panels with the wall paper, which then led into the hall of bones.
	The bone hall lead into the skull room.
	Some of the few pictures that survived from the party, show the skull room with blue LED spotlights shining up.
The resulting walls turned out great. The cardboard provided excellent sound insulation, and we where able to have different sounds in each room. The walls kept out the sounds of the party in the rest of the hall. The wall where very inexpensive, but they were also labor intensive.

Hit Counter