Halloween: Pirate Display

Halloween is my favorite holiday. Over the years we’ve created some stuff like:

In 2011, we made a skeleton out of PVC:

In 2013, we created two bean bag games for our son’s school Halloween party. Mike drew the art and I painted them. The games were used for 6 years:

This year, I wanted to create a bigger yard display for Halloween. I went with a pirate theme after buying this 5 ft pirate skeleton from Costco:

I searched online for ideas using PVC pipe. We decided to make a ship mast and a wheel. We went to Home Depot and just tried putting pieces together like a puzzle – trying to figure out what we needed to buy. We bought about 30 feet of PVC pipe (various sizes) and Mike cut them to size. For the smaller pieces, we strung them between chairs using string and spray painted them brown:

We used yard stakes to help hold up the larger pieces to paint those too:

Mike came up with the idea to paint the wheel two-toned to look like gold and wood. The middle of the wheel is a cap that Mike drilled holes through to connect the PVC. We used zip ties to attach the pirate to the wheel:

We bought a whiskey barrel to use for the crow’s nest. Mike drilled holes in it for water drainage and to connect to the PVC pipe. We also had to tether the mask to the ground, tree, and house to keep it upright. Almost complete:

We also added some old pirate clothes we had. Video of the finished display with fog and sound machine on Halloween night: