{"id":4174,"date":"2026-09-28T10:25:54","date_gmt":"2026-09-28T17:25:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.albertzone.com\/halloween\/?p=4174"},"modified":"2026-09-28T10:25:56","modified_gmt":"2026-09-28T17:25:56","slug":"what-a-piece-of-junk-building-with-found-objects","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.albertzone.com\/halloween\/2026\/09\/what-a-piece-of-junk-building-with-found-objects\/","title":{"rendered":"What a Piece of Junk: Building with Found Objects"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I have always loved building things out of found items. Whether it was making a puppet from a bike brake I found on the side of the road or making space ships from cardboard tubes, making things out of things people discard is a design challenge that has excited me since I was young.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For our Halloween houses, we employ that mindset a lot. For almost all of the houses we have made, we have used discarded appliance boxes, donated cardboard or other items that we can get for cheap, or free. We use them as starting points for our sets and props. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

For this year’s house, we were able to find a LOT of free and discarded items that will help us build the world of the Mandalorian. Below are just some of our amazing finds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Near where we live, it seems like you can always find 5 gallon buckets on the sides of the freeways. We needed a bunch to build some moisture vaporators and our freeways did not disappoint.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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We wanted to populate the Nevarro set with lots of Star Wars-y crates and boxes. Facebook Marketplace pointed us to several amazing free sources, including large fish-transporting foam coolers and wooden drum\/instrument shipping crates.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A friend’s church had ordered 8 long folding tables, each of which came in its own 8’X4′ cardboard box, and he notified me the day they were getting rid of the boxes so I could add those to our collection of Halloween house building materials. If you take in to account that each of those boxes has two 8’X4′ sides, that is 64 ft. of flat cardboard, 8 ft. high, that’s a LOT of cardboard, all for free. (I have made entire Halloween house sets with less cardboard than that). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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There are so many fun materials out there that people dispose of which can be re-used for projects. Granted, if you do collect items like these for a project, for a while your yard might look like this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I have always loved building things out of found items. Whether it was making a puppet from a bike brake I found on the side…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4168,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[405],"tags":[53,408,31],"class_list":["post-4174","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-405","tag-cardboard","tag-found-items","tag-halloween"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.albertzone.com\/halloween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4174","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.albertzone.com\/halloween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.albertzone.com\/halloween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.albertzone.com\/halloween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.albertzone.com\/halloween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4174"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.albertzone.com\/halloween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4174\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4177,"href":"https:\/\/www.albertzone.com\/halloween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4174\/revisions\/4177"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.albertzone.com\/halloween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4168"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.albertzone.com\/halloween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4174"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.albertzone.com\/halloween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4174"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.albertzone.com\/halloween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4174"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}