Be a ghoulish Picasso with your Fox Lake garage door as your canvas

In the past, you may have created a spooky Halloween scene in your Fox Lake garage. You covered the walls with black plastic and decorated with scary creatures. In the middle of the garage, you had a decorated table with a tub of candy for trick or treaters. But, with COVID-19, you may not feel inclined to open the garage to all those little ghouls. 

This doesn’t mean you have to skip Halloween Trick-or-Treating altogether. You simply need to modify your approach – apply your creativity a little differently. Even if you never created a haunted hovel in the garage before, you may want to give it a whirl this year, just for fun.

Keeping the garage door closed means witches and goblins can’t come in. But you can still provide a scary scene outside. Maybe you’ll have a bowl of candy on a table outside the garage for trick or treaters to take from on the honor system.

Think of your garage door as a eerie canvas where you can express the frightening specters of your creative juices. Along with blow-up dragons and witches on the front lawn, you can make your garage door the envy of the neighborhood this Halloween. Just to get those creative juices flowing, here are some ideas to consider:

• Project Halloween images onto your garage door
• Strategically place a light so it shines through a sheet dancing in the breeze to create petrifying shadows on the door
• Put a black sheet on the door and decorate it with spooky cutouts and pictures
• Fill a glove, put it in a shirt, stick it under the garage door 
• Make a flattened witch with the back of a broom sticking out of the garage door as though they crashed
• Put spooky figures in the windows alongside the garage door with light shining up on them, or from behind, so that they create a haunting image
• Put spider webs in the corners and tombstones of a graveyard in front of the garage door
• Make it appear that blood is dripping from between the panels of the door as though the garage is filled to the brim with blood
• Decorate as though the door is a large face with scary eyes and sharp teeth
• Hang bats from the eves

Of course, you may want to open the garage door and build a haunted scene inside. Whatever you decide, have a wonderful and spooky Fox Lake Halloween.

Currently, Trick or Treating is scheduled for 3 to 6 p.m. Saturday. However, you should check with the city for any changes in hours or special instructions related to the pandemic.

Make sure garage door seals and keep leaves outdoors

 This time of year, they invade your home. You find them everywhere: on the kitchen floor, on your rugs and carpet; upstairs and in the basement. LEAVES!!! How are they so successfully invasive? The answer is so simple. They hitchhike on your shoes. That means that they start outdoors. But the gateway where they have the most success is in your garage.

You pull the car into the garage and leaves come with you on your tires. Or the wind blows them in while the door is open. However, they get there, you step out of the car and they stick to your shoes. Then they let go when you’re inside the house. In fact, once they’re in the garage, you could run out to the garage to grab some dog food or something. When you go back into the house, you’ve got leaves tagging along.

It’s a nuisance in the house cleaning up all those leaves. That’s particularly the case after people have stepped on the leaves and ground them into the carpet or hardwood floor. 

Wet leaves pose a safety hazard

Leaves are also a safety hazard on hardened floors, such as the hardwood mentioned above, or the concrete in the garage. The leaves are frequently wet. You can easily slip on them and fall. In either case, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Prevention means cleaning the leaves in your garage before they have a chance to hitch a ride into your house. It’s also important to clean the leaves from in front of the doors – the front door, the patio door and the garage door.

Of course, this time of year, no sooner do you clean the leaves up than Mother Nature puts more leaves down where you cleaned up the other leaves. You have to stay after the leaves. Keep a broom near the front door and the patio door. A leaf blower ready to go by the garage door will help.

You may also want to avoid leaving the garage door open for extended periods. The longer it is open, the more chance that leaves will blow in from outside.

It’s also important to make sure that your garage door closes completely. This means that you want to check the weather strip at the bottom of the garage door. Then you want to make sure the door is adjusted so it closes completely. It should come down far enough that the rubber weather strip seals against the floor.