If you love Halloween, don’t let a small space keep you from expressing yourself, even if you’re moving from a house to an apartment, or you’re just getting used to life without a yard. Relocating within Houston or across the country doesn’t have to spoil your holiday fun. There are plenty of ways to show your spooky side in an apartment of any size. Here are just a few Halloween apartment decorating ideas to get you started:
Use the front door — especially if you love trick-or-treaters.
Every apartment has a front door, whether it looks out into a hallway where your neighbors walk by, or it faces outside for the whole world to see. Decking out your door is one of the simplest Halloween apartment decorating ideas, and it’s especially helpful if you look forward to seeing trick-or-treaters on Halloween night. Make your door spooky, but not too scary, to let the little ones know that you’ll be happy to see them — and ready with the candy. Remember that door wreaths aren’t just for Christmas. Spooky, silly, or sweet Halloween wreaths are easy DIY crafts, and there are plenty of ideas and tutorial links at About.com’s Home channel and at Better Homes and Gardens’ web site. If you’d rather go all-out and wrap your whole door in Halloween goodness, check out this post from the Homedit Interior Design and Architecture blog. It shows monster doors, cobweb doors, crime scene doors, and more.
Make exterior windows extra spooky.
Who needs a yard to decorate, when your apartment has so many windows? Classic Halloween window ideas include perching jack-o-lanterns just inside, spreading fake cobwebs hung with plastic spiders, and setting spooky candles (well-watched real ones or battery-operated ones, with or without dripping fake blood) in the windowsill. Spooky silhouettes are classic apartment Halloween decorations, too. This tutorial from Make magazine shows how to enlarge any image you like, trace it onto inexpensive black paper, and set it up in a backlit window. For more ideas, check out this collection of 25 Halloween window silhouettes from Shelterness. Not scary enough for you? Try hanging a simple white sheet over the window, and projecting a ghostly video onto it. Truly terrifying projections, like this one, can be downloaded from Ebay and other sources.
Got a balcony? The possibilities are endless.
If your Houston apartment has a balcony, it has all of the decorating potential of a front yard. Jack-o-lanterns and painted pumpkins placed here should be safe from pumpkin-smashing tricksters, so go crazy with the gourds in your Halloween balcony decor, if you like. Pinterest is a great source for Halloween apartment decor ideas, including glowing ghosts, paper lanterns, and dry-ice-breathing pumpkins.
