After Peet and I have participated in the construction of the Haunted House at our daughter’s school, Richland Elementary, the previous year, we had to ask if we could invite other gamers to come help out too! They were excited to get the extra help and that game artists wanted to come help create their Wild West themed haunted house.

So we gathered up some other Gamers for Good and headed over to the school one Sat afternoon in early October.

After some design talks, we took on the gold mine shaft and the downtown facade that fronts the haunted house (portable classroom). We took sheets of cardboard that were the height of the room about 8 feet by 6 feet wide and suspended them from the ceiling grid system to create a maze to lead the guests through our haunted gold mine.

Peet had also strategically cut in openings and created space for scarers to hid inside certain wall sections, it was so cool.

We then split the gold mine team into two teams; nuggets and rocks.

The nuggets team was tasked with cutting egg carton sections apart and then painting those sections with gold paint.
The rocks team needed to take rolls of brown butcher paper and build up the on the cardboard sheet which we folded and cut to reform in more cave like silhouettes with stalactites and stalagmites.

While the mine was coming together, I went outside to check out the how the facade was coming along. The huge sheets of plywood that would create the backdrop had been painted all black, had dried and were now ready to have the town painted.

We ended up working until it was past dark to get everything done, but it turned out awesome. The school made a lot of money off ticket sales and we had a great time contributing. Here are some pics of our finished product.