Day 364- Nightmare before Xmas

Happy belated Halloween everyone! Hope all you goblins and ghoulies had a great show! As far as our haunt went.....it didn't!! The Halloween Snow Storm which was a freaking disaster, came into New England on Saturday night and killed a thousand hours of building, planning and anticipation for what was going to be our greatest haunt ever! The forecast was for around 4" or so...add about a foot to that and that's what we got. Trees down everywhere, power out for days and I was out there every couple of hours getting snow off the canopy covering the vortex! We also had a pine tree go down about a foot away from the canopy! I was a complete wreck over the disaster unfolding,  but perhaps there is a good side to all this. While we did get everything done barely in time, we really weren't ready. Lot's of things had to be fine tuned we didn't get a chance to do. Now that this happened, we are simply going to do the exact same build for next year! That should give us plenty of time to get it right and take some of those last minute throw down areas to the next level! We can certainly make a few improvements to the design, and we know with certainty that the vortex can be quickly reassembled. This will definitely free up some budgeting for next year. And thankfully no precious assets were destroyed by the storm. If any of you decide to use a canopy, make sure to duct tape all the connections!. This is what saved us from the snow loads collapsing everything. We might have an additional post or 2 before the holiday sign-off and there might be a how-to page on the elevator. Haven't decided whether to do it this year or not. One really good thing also is that a lot of stuff I can save intact so both the take down and set-up will be way easier and less stressful. This October was probably the most stressed out I have been during a build. The level of detail and complexity was intense as you could probably tell. So not all bad that we have another year to perfect it!

So what did we do with no power and no haunted house on Halloween night! We played 'Nightmare before Xmas Monopoly'