Haunt Weekly - Episode 459 - 8 Reasons We Hate Our Past Selves

[0:22] Hello everyone, I'm Jonathan. I'm Krystal. And this is Haunt Weekly, a weekly podcast for the haunted attraction entertainment community. Whether you're an actor, owner, or just plain aficionado, we aim to be a podcast for you. And it is that special time of year. Pro haunts have are either already been open for Friday the 13th or opening probably this coming weekend. Right. Home haunts, like us, are in full swing for preparations. And basically, it's officially haunt season, y'all. Haunt season 2024 is underway. And we're going to talk some about our plans for this haunt season, as well as eight reasons we have come to hate our past selves. Yeah. Maybe if you listen to this episode and take our advice, uh you will not hate your your future self will not hate you today as much as we hate us you know 5 10 15 years ago right now yeah because we got some real beef with those assholes well yeah i don't think that young us thought about us getting old and having to deal with their bullshit, yeah you know the the version of us in our 20s was a real dick i mean let's just be honest right Right? Anyways. But definitely, if that doesn't sound like your cup of tea or cup of haunt, check out other Haunt Weekly episodes at hauntweekly.com, hauntweekly.com, hauntweekly.com on Twitter.

[1:50] Hauntweekly.com on Facebook, and youtube.com slash hauntweekly, as well as wherever you get your podcast from.

[1:58] We're going to go into details about work we did for the haunt in a second. Yeah. So we'll skip over that section here because it's part of the main show today. Yeah. Ha-ha-ha.

[2:09] Last week we asked a question of the week. We asked, what haunt should we visit in Kansas City? I've got to be honest, we did not get a lot of feedback. No, only Nick Nixon said that we should go to the Beast. And it looks like we probably will. In fact, I'm tentatively planning to go to the Beast and Edge of Hell. Two haunts owned by the same people that are about a block apart. Yeah. So that could be fun. and they're in downtown Kansas City so yeah I'm looking forward to that red reviews but we're gonna get a little bit more into that trip upcoming okay, So, as we mentioned at the top of the show, you know, all of two minutes and 45 seconds ish ago, haunt season is in full swing. Not much denying that. And for us, construction is in full swing.

[3:03] And we're actually, oh, that's right. We forgot to do. Thanks. Yeah. Thanks for that. We do got to ask this week's question of the week. Right. Which we're getting ready to jump into ourselves is what haunting mistake do you wish you could go back in time and fix? Yeah. Which is what we're talking about this whole episode. Yeah. Sorry, I always do that. Yeah, I know. If you could warn your current self from the past. If you warn your past self. Your past self from the current. Yeah.

[3:32] We've got our eight highlights here. But yeah, what haunting mistake do you wish you could fix? Visit Home Weekly at all the places. Leave a comment. Send us an email. We read everything at some point. Anyways as we were saying construction is in full swing no other way around it um the good news is it actually seems to be going fairly well yeah i'm actually very happy with the progress, i'm a little panicked about time still me too but not as panicked as i was yeah and as well when whenever we get down to number eight i will explain why i'm not as panicked as i was a week ago. Yeah, but basically we've pretty much finished all the demo that we had to do. We did a lot of that actually over winter. We got a lot of the initial demo done in winter. That was the one thing we were very good about doing during the not hot season. Yeah, now we did change our plan some and still moved five walls this weekend. Yeah.

[4:35] Yeah. Basically, the entire back half of the haunt is being rebuilt. Mm-hmm. And part of that was we took apart one of our oldest scares. Originally, it was a disappearing wall. Mm-hmm. It's an eight-foot by eight-foot frame. Yeah. It was originally a disappearing wall. We then repurposed it as a giant breakaway wall. Right. Which was a pain in the ass for the actors to use, but did create quite the hell of an effect. People were scared. But we decided to do away with it for myriad reasons. We'll actually get into it in the main body of the episode. But we had to take it apart. Yeah. We had to literally destroy it. And so that was one of my projects one day as well. While you were chopping wood and putting in supports, which is another part of this. Right. I was put in charge of taking that apart and salvaging what wood could be. And it turns out, thanks to all of the probably about a decade of abuse that thing took, some of the wood was still good, but a lot of it clearly had been rattled. Yeah, it's going to be mainly used for support pieces and scrap. Yeah, it's all scrap now, pretty much, basically, which is fine. We do have a good, healthy need for scrap. We have all but two of the walls back in place.

[6:03] We've got a few skins we have to put back. All but one. We only have one wall to go. Okay, I thought we had two. No. But either way, we've made a ton of progress in that space. Yes. Yes, we have.

[6:14] So we're going to finish putting the walls in place probably tomorrow and Thursday. Right. and then Friday, Saturday, Sunday, we're working on the yard display. We're going to get that up. Now that we seem to be out of the path of Hurricane Helene.

[6:31] Knock on all the wood. Knock on all the wood. I mean, our thoughts go to our friends, including the Muehlbergers, who are in the path of it right now. Right over Florida. And that's the thing that sucks about hurricanes is, you know, we know people all over the Gulf Coast. So anytime a storm enters the Gulf Coast, someone we know, if not us directly will be in the fire of it right and I'm sure that we'll have something one in the news that will have a shorter season because of it or possibly even no season right so yeah hopefully this turns out to be a big nothing burger and it passes like a fart like a fart in the Gulf it should be yeah but I'm looking at these intensity forecasts and I'm getting nervous I got to admit, but still hoping for the best, preparing for the worst at all times. But yeah, we got almost all the balls in place. We're going to finish that over the next couple weeks, then we got to do the yard display this weekend.

[7:29] A little bit rough because we only have one weekend to really dedicate to the art display. Right. And usually we have two. Yeah, we only have one weekend this year because the weekend after it, the first Friday, Saturday in October, basically, we are making a trick.

[7:47] Now, the main purpose of the trip is our stepson's baby shower. Right. The baby shower for our stepgrandson. Yeah. is being held that Saturday. Or Sunday, now. It's Sunday, isn't it? It's Sunday. It's the 6th. Yeah, Sunday the 6th.

[8:08] But in typical, hey, if you're going to hold an event in October fashion, we're giving ourselves a little bit of extra time. We'll be leaving, we think, Wednesday because we're going to go via Kansas City to hit a few haunts in that area. Now, the tentative plans are Thursday, we're going to hit The Beast and Edge of Hell. Like I said, they'll be both open that Thursday. And I'm looking for other haunts that have that day open, too.

[8:36] Then on Friday, we're going to Exiled KC, which we talked about the Daryl and Bozeman haunt. Right.

[8:45] And talked about how I'm literally sitting underneath a letter signed by them. And so, yeah, this is a big deal. We're trying to figure out which of the packages we're doing. Right. And it may be that we do different packages. I mean, it may just be that that's what we have to do. Yeah, we'll figure it out. We're going to talk about it. We haven't made any firm plans yet, but we're going to do that. And possibly if we're done with that early enough, hit another haunt in that area. I found a couple others that were close by that we'd be able to hit on that Friday night if we get out early enough. Yeah so basically we're planning on hitting somewhere between we'll say three to five haunts in the kansas city area over thursday and friday then saturday we're driving we're driving you know eastward now to get to st louis right and in st louis um we're going to spend our saturday night revisiting one of our favorite haunts of all time waterloo sportsman club yes and Ellie's family is going to join us for that yeah it's gonna be a lot of us there we're bringing a team a crew there basically yeah and so we're expecting to bring between like six to ten people it's gonna be a lot of fun and I loved Waterloo and it was the surprise hit of that trip yeah after being so disappointed by Limp Brewery in the darkness and then happened and stumbling upon this haunt by a flyer in a costume shop.

[10:13] And then just going, fuck it, let's go. And then we went and just had an amazing time. It's a huge trail haunt, like a multiple mile long trail, beautifully lit, beautifully maintained, with lots of creative scares. And apparently it's one of the longest running haunts in the country. Yeah. And I figure, even with it being so close to St. Louis, we would never probably get to do it again because they run so few nights. In fact, this season, they're only open six nights. nights and we happen to be in town for one of them we're the second night so that guys they don't open halloween weekend right they don't do anything halloween weekend so they're open the first three friday saturdays and that's it so that's pretty wild but yeah we're gonna hit that tend the baby shower come home and then we have just two more weeks three weeks and two weekends before opening. Yeah. And that's a lot.

[11:10] Yes. Yes, it is. Luckily, like I said, I don't feel as bad about getting it done as I did about two weeks ago. I'm over that major panic mode.

[11:23] I do think we'll have it done. And I do think we'll have a great yard display. I think we're going to have some good stuff this year. but man did the heat really fuck us over yeah because we both really had the itch to work on it and late as early as like mid-august right on my birthday yeah we started talking about it and the heat index just never got low enough we it used to be we'd have fairly regular days, of relatively calm weather and we even had a hurricane this year and it didn't come with the perfect weather afterward what a ripoff yeah i know that was pretty that's like 90 of the benefit of a hurricane yeah is that you get amazing weather the days after like the best weather you'll ever see in your life after nope nope fuck that still heat index or feels like temps well above 100 8 000 humidity that they're so muggy it stole my wallet well and even though The rains lately have not been cooling off the temperature at all. Yeah, we had a rainstorm, I think it was Sunday. Yeah. And we're like, oh yeah, maybe that'll cool things off. Because you can see the storm clouds coming. You smell the ozone, you know it's coming. Like, oh yeah, that'll cool things off. No, it feels like temperature went up after a rain. Yeah. I want a scientific explanation of that. Because that is crazy. It shot up like five degrees.

[12:49] And the air was already human as fuck before it.

[12:53] So, yeah, that pissed me off. But anyways, so we are very excited about this trip. It's not going to be a big, huge trip like the Atlanta one or the Chicago one. And we're definitely not going to be able to hit all the haunts we, quote, unquote, want to, simply because we only realistically have two nights, and it's a Thursday-Friday, which is kind of eh. Well, and if we find something else Saturday that we can go to, we'll go to it. Yeah. But we'll be in St. Louis by then. and we need to be in St. Louis by then. Yeah. And since the primary focus of this trip is the baby shower. Yeah. Yeah. That has to come first. Right. So we'll skip a few haunts. I'm sorry if we skip one that either you're at or you're passionate about. But just know that it's not, that this trip is short and will not be one of our mammoth go-all-out crazy go-nuts, hit every haunt we can find in this city. No. like we did with Houston or Atlanta or Chicago, et cetera. Yeah, it's just going to be a flyback. Yeah. We'll get what we can, and probably I really think this trip is going

[14:00] to be more determined by what we can get to rather than what's the best. Right. Geography is going to be more important, basically, and who's open on the random days that we're there.

[14:13] But, yeah, anyway, construction. As we said, construction is going on, and we have a strange tradition every time this right around this point where we start cursing the ever-loving shit out of the past us yeah.

[14:29] We really do. We are very mean to past us. Well, they deserve it. I mean, to be fair, they do. Yeah. They're dicks. They didn't think about the random aches and shit that we would have when we got older. I think of all the times when building a haunt, we said, well, that's a future us problem. And now we're future us and we're pissed. Yeah. So, yeah. But we're always cursing our past selves. We're always cursing ourselves for dumb decisions we made, the stupid ways we did things, etc., etc. etc. And so, basically, the point of this episode is to cobble together eight ways.

[15:05] That have really come up this season. All of these have been very prevalent this season, but I think any of these eight can come up last season, the season before, etc. Yeah. So, yeah, any of these can be... Blah, blah. Train derailed. Okay. Any of these can come up at any time. Yeah. And they... Some of these we've mentioned before. Yeah. On different lists. Yeah. Of tips and tricks and things like that. But, yeah, so we're just framing some of these a little differently is what it comes down to.

[15:39] But, yeah, all of this is going to be construction and design stuff. So if you're not a builder or a designer of a haunt, then maybe this won't be the most interesting episode. But at the same time, you'll get to laugh at our past stuff and how stupid we were. So, I don't know. I think it's pretty entertaining. All right. Alright, number one and the mistake I think I really do regret the most.

[16:03] OSB versus plywood. Now look, we have been very skint in years gone by. We've literally, like the years we did most of the original building of the haunt, like getting these panels done, we were literally using every penny we had in the haunt. And every penny counted. Yeah, and by every penny we mean doing the dumb thing that you absolutely should not do of maxing out your credit cards to build a haunted house that's free. Yeah.

[16:38] So one of the things that we did in the early years was we tried to save money on materials by getting the cheapest, we'll say, paneling possible. And we purchased OSB. Now, if you're unfamiliar with OSB, OSB is known as, it's object straddle, I'm trying to remember what it's named. It's an acronym, but basically what it means is that instead of having a solid piece of wood, they take a bunch of tiny wood chip type things and glue the shit out of it together.

[17:08] Yeah, so it's not a smooth surface to start from. No. And the thing about it is, I actually looked this up on Home Depot before we started working on this, and realized we were only saving $2 to $3 per sheet. Yeah. Not much. like the very first first we did which i think might be better than osb but not as good as plywood was masonite boards yes but they are now more expensive than plywood yeah because i i recently checked those yeah masonite is now considered a finishing wood i believe yeah when we were i i don't know if maybe like it got reclassified or what happened but she's absolutely right because i remember when you did your um paint prod painting your show right in college that you were required to do for your degree um you bought masonite because it was like ten dollars a sheet yeah ten dollars or less yeah it was silly cheap and these days masonite is not silly cheap yeah it's more expensive than the thin plywoods and but basically everything about osb sucks Yeah. And I'm just going to say it now. There are, other than that $2 to $3 savings, which really does not matter on the scale we were buying it. And probably, unless you're buying literally hundreds and hundreds of these, won't even be a noticeable financial difference for anyone else.

[18:37] It's just, it sucks. Because first and foremost, it is heavier. It is so much heavier. even the same thickness because of the glue what is so dense and heavy it, I mean, we have a piece of OSB we've got to get rid of, and that's one of our projects tomorrow or Thursday.

[18:58] And I'm not looking forward to moving that motherfucker. No, not really. It's heavy. And it's even heavier now because it's goddamn wet, which gets to another problem with it. If OSB gets water anywhere near it, it starts to deteriorate like that. It is not durable. Plywood can take some beating.

[19:22] Or, I'm sorry, I should have referred to plywood as sheathing, but nobody does that. No. No haunter does it. The other thing with OSB is that it is more prone to splinter. So, if somebody runs their hand on it while they're running through your haunt, they could get splinters. So, it is a little more dangerous for the customers. And even if they don't get a splinter, they're still very likely to knock some of those wood chips off and destroy whatever paint job you worked your ass off to get on the goddamn board because it doesn't take paint. No, it takes three or four coats to get it even. Because that's the thing. Those two to three dollars you quote unquote saved probably got eaten up in the fucking paint. Yep. And if it didn't get eaten up in the fucking paint, it got eaten up in the fucking medical bills trying to haul that shit around. That and the time. At the time, yeah. So, I believe, my personal belief now, is after working with both extensively, that the plywood, the sheathing, whatever, is much cheaper for haunts, just because of all the reasons we said. And, like I said, that $2 to $3 savings per panel, per sheet, ain't worth it. No. It just ain't. And also, it does not cut well. No, it doesn't. Our table saw that we have kicked it back at us. Yeah, plywood and sheeting, no problem. Right through. Every time. Beautiful.

[20:48] OSB, no sir, it will refuse to take it. I don't know where the fuck it got so judgy.

[20:55] But it's because it's denser, it's thicker, and that particular saw cannot handle it well. And it's unpredictable when cutting it. It's uneven. Exactly, because of all the chips and the way that it's compressed. Yeah, OSB is just terrible bullshit. Do not buy it for your haunt. Spend the extra $2 to $3. If you're broke and you're just trying to get by, I understand. I feel you. We've all been there. But, man, that is not where you want to save your money. No, and because here's the thing, is that it'll last longer, the plywood will, than the OSB. Absolutely. Especially if you're like we are in a human climate. Yeah, you'll be able to reuse it over and over and not have to deal with the stupid shit that we've had to deal with. Yeah. Yeah, we've been cycling all the OSB out. In fact, I think we're getting rid of the last of it this year finally. I hope so. We keep finding pieces of it. Yeah, well, we'll get down to that in just a little bit about why we keep finding pieces of it. That's another item on this list. But, yeah, it is so, so bad. And the other thing about it is you talked about reusing it over and over again, which you're right. One of the reasons you can use plywood over and over and over again, though, is because it takes paint so well. You can just re-coat it. as many you can recode it until you're tired of recoding it OSB once you get that first coat on good luck getting a second.

[22:20] Yeah. It gets even harder to paint with the second and third iterations. And no, I don't know why. You would think that wouldn't be the case. But it is definitely true. I think it's because you have to put so much of the first coat on that it always shines through the second. Yeah.

[22:35] Anyways, number two. Number two. Our frustration this year. The great screw divide. Oh, man. So, this one's not completely on us. Yeah, I can't take total ownership of this. No, when we started, there was basically Phillips head that we used. Yeah, some flathead. Some stuff did come in flathead at the time. Yeah, and we got a great deal that was an accidental purchase.

[23:08] It wasn't on our side. They had marked down these giant contractor tubs of screws incorrectly. Correctly yeah they were supposed to be like a couple dollars per pound yeah but they put the per pound price and for the actual price they rang up for like three dollars for a 40 pound thing yeah we did ask them to make sure that that was the correct price before we bought just so you know and literally we grabbed all we could carry yeah so we used those for years but then we found out about torque spits and i i will say this if i were starting over we just yeeted everything Everything we've done and started over, everything would be Torx bit. Yeah, including concrete screws. They now make them that way. Yes. Torx is so superior to Phillips head. But the problem is, so we started making the switch to Torx about 10 years ago. I don't remember exactly when we did it, but we started making it 10 years ago. And even now we're constantly having to switch bits to go back to philip's head or god help us we run into anything your dad put in with a square head where the fuck do you even find those i don't know i mean yeah.

[24:25] It was, it's always a mystery what kind of screw we're going to find. And so we've had to devise ways with our impact drivers and our drills to kind of staple the other kind of bit to it. It's mostly Phillips and torques, and it's getting to be overwhelmingly torques finally. But as we move those walls that hadn't been touched in eons this year, we talked about that in the last episode. And why that was such a hassle. It was all Phillips heads, Phillips screws. Yeah. And if we ever take those frames apart, that's going to be Phillips head as well. Absolutely, yeah. And they're not going to have the other thing we were talking about in a minute. But, yeah, the main thing. Go ahead. And the reason that Torx is better is because it's harder to strip them because there's more places for the bit to grip. Yeah.

[25:15] And, I mean, I'm not going to say they're impossible to strip. We have stripped a few. you but the person i once again having worked a lot with both i will say that i have stripped probably five times as many phillips head screws as torx i would agree with that um probably at least five times me though once again we'll get into why that may be there may be a cheat code there, Because the third item on the list is putting washers on screws. Ladies and gentlemen, I cannot stress this enough. Yeah. This is another one of those areas where spending a little bit of money will save you so much time and so much money, I would argue. Yeah, and I would order your washers online. Yeah, don't Home Depot this. Yeah, Home Depot doesn't have a good price. I think Walmart locally is. Yeah, Walmart actually has a decent one. When we've had to like randomly scramble to get more. Yeah, Walmart had a decent price, but the best price is always going to be,

[26:17] I believe we used the number 10 washer. Just a tiny little washer, fits around the screw, but not the head. And the reason we do that is because we have to have the mindset that everything at some point, it has to come apart. Yeah. So this is especially true for the screws you put in connecting your panels. Right, exactly. It's especially true for those. But we also do it when building panels now, because those might have to come apart someday, too.

[26:45] Everything is temporary in those. It's one of the attitudes we had to get into. Yeah, and this was something that I picked up on a YouTube channel a long, long time ago. Was it Garage of Evil? I don't know. I don't remember. But basically, these guys in the YouTube channel, I remember the video. Yeah. I saw it and went, damn, that's smart. I know right they were building a pallet maze yeah and having to do a lot of intricate connections with the screws and then they're like every screw gets a washer and I'm like why would you do that and then they're like so you can back it out easy the screws don't get countersunk and they don't strip them trying to pull them back out right oh and the very next fucking day I think we went out all the biggest bag of the washers we could oh man honestly it works, It is such a cheat code because, like, the main thing is it prevents the screw from getting sunk in too deep. And it makes it so that it has a lower friction surface to start spinning against whenever you go to pull it out. And it just makes it so that even after years of sitting there doing nothing, it will come out like butter damn near every time. Yeah. Now, I will say that I do like the larger diameter washers.

[28:04] So that after years of paint, you can still find them. Yeah, that's a good point, too. Yeah, because we just took some out of ones that had a little bit of the spray foam on top of it for padding. Yeah, I can definitely see the merit of doing it that way.

[28:23] We typically use the smaller ones just to avoid it from sticking out too much or being too intrusive. And they're cheaper. And they're cheaper. paper especially once again if you buy them by the fuck ton on amazon or something like that but my god this is such an amazing thing when we learned this this completely changed the way that we built built built our stuff and now obviously not every screw needs a washer for example if you're using a bracket and it's going into metal anyway basically yeah you don't put a washer on that because it's already got the bracket is the washer at this point so and you And with a bracket, you really don't want to put more separation there between the screw and the bracket anyway. So, yeah. But no, this has really made our life so much easier. And we curse so fucking hard whenever we find screws that don't have washers that need to come out. Mm-hmm. Because we do find them. And they're very often Phillips heads, which is the double whammy of one out of eight of these is going to strip. Yeah. Just nothing can be done about that. No matter how good you do, no matter how much you properly put your weight on it, one out of eight is going to strip almost every fucking time, I swear to God. Especially if it's been up for a long time.

[29:41] Right, and we actually did buy a new reciprocating saw to take care of these. Also, something that I wanted to mention is that screw positioning has also changed. Yes. Because we have.

[29:56] In the beginning, we would try to get the screws as close to the corner, so barely enough room for the drill, no matter which corner it was, to connect it to another panel. Now we leave enough room that we don't have to get on the ground. Yeah, the general rule is when we're connecting two panels that are going side by side, we have one screw that's fairly close to the middle, usually on top of the cross piece board. Yeah. And then we have one that's about halfway between the cross piece and the floor, and one that's a little bit above halfway above.

[30:30] And basically, all our positions that are comfortable to reach, we don't need a stepladder, we don't need to get on the floor. And we do this because the idea was when we were putting them in the very far corners, yes, it's extra work, but it's better supporting. But that's not really how that works. And honestly, if you're supporting the wall that way, you're probably fucking up. Because the fourth thing we mad at previous us about is some of the poorly supported walls. Some of which we had forgotten all about how badly supported they were. It got rough. And this is dangerous for customers or visitors.

[31:09] Because if they hit these poorly supported walls, something bad could happen. Never has happened, luckily. No. But something could. But it's also dangerous for us. Just this year, one of those walls that we moved nearly fell on us, and we weren't ready for it because it only had, like, one screw holding it up on the backside. We're like, okay, pulling out the first screw, and then it starts coming down. Yeah, we were very surprised. Luckily, no one was hurt. It didn't even actually fall. We managed to catch it, but there was a moment. Heart rates were elevated. Apple Watches were deeply concerned. you know so you know that happened but yeah.

[31:53] It's amazing how bad we were at this and that we have not had any injuries. Yeah. I'm a little bit amazed because some of the ones we did were truly not supported and they were not supported in either the correct directions, not against the force of where the impact was likely to come from, and they were not secured to multiple surfaces. Yeah. And that's one thing that we have completely changed our policy on. Right. In fact, this year we've moved some walls around so that eight-foots can be connected to eight-foots across the thing. And basically, the entire haunt from one side to the other can now be connected in one structure. Yeah. And because of that, we can exploit it and connect it to multiple points to the garage superstructure. Yeah. Both the rafters above and to the walls, the four walls on each side. Yeah. Yeah, the main... Or to the concrete floor. Right. Yeah, the main issues that we had were the walls that we talked about moving that are near the washer and dryer. Because it's near the washer and dryer, we still have to have access to those.

[33:07] And we didn't think about as much about how is it possible to secure them whenever we were first building them. Yeah. But now that's fixed. Now, those walls are some of the sturdiest in the goddamn garage right now. And basically the attitude we've taken is every panel has to be secured to two hard points. And I've been going around the haunt while working and just like nudging, kicking, and shaking walls. And I've been very impressed by the stability and the durability that it is now. It's so much more solid. They feel like actual walls. It's much, much better. I mean, I always felt we did a pretty good job supporting walls. Like I said, we never had an incident. Right. But now we're doing so much better, and I really am happy for current us for that. Number five, leveling. What's that? I don't know, but you always bitch about it. Well, I want to say this. When we took down that disappearing slash breakaway wall, we checked before we undid it. It was literally level on zero axes.

[34:20] Now, this was a wall that was taking a lot of hits because of the slam wall that was built into it. And it had been working that way for years and years and years, so there was a lot of force on it. So even if it had gone up level, it wasn't anymore. Literally none of the axes was at anywhere near level. And that...

[34:43] And that wall, yeah, you're probably right. It probably was at least more level when it went up. And it probably got twisted and torqued a little bit during operation, which that's going to happen. You can't really do much about that other than check it and re-level it, you know, or level plummet and all that stuff. But the main problem we have is that we would be very loose with our leveling.

[35:10] And part of the problem is the garage ain't doing us any fucking favors in this space no right now the walls are now level but there are three walls that are off the ground yeah and that's because the if you are facing the garage the right hand side literally all along that wall, is really unlevel it goes down about an inch over about it's got a very very drastic.

[35:36] Fantastic rise and run there. It goes down about an inch over a foot. The floor in the center, relatively level. The floor on the left-hand side, level-ish, but level enough. But that one section really is poorly level, and we just never really addressed it. And one thing we may want to do if we're going to continue doing this for many years is pull everything out, get some leveling compound, and re-level that section. Okay. Just so that we don't have this problem year after year after year. But, I mean, the bigger problem we had, though, was we were just slapping walls in place and not really giving a shit if it was level or not. No. And the problem is if you make a mistake leveling on one wall, anything you attach to it, either through a support piece or a butt up beside it, is going to be equally unlevel. It's a problem that sort of grows and gets exponentially worse as you put more stuff down. So, one of the things we've gotten better at is being much more careful with our leveling and making sure that everything is level, plumb, square, all that good stuff. And doing as good of a job as we physically can with our wonky-ass garage. And so that way we don't fuck up everything in the haunt by just ignoring it and being a little slack about it.

[36:52] Oh yeah, number six is fun. Number six, electrical stupidity.

[36:59] So, whenever we got the house, my dad was working as an electrician and helped us double the number of outlets in the garage. Yeah, the ceiling outlets specifically. Yeah. Because I think the garage only came with four two-plug outlets, like in the whole thing. Yeah. And they were designed for the lights specifically. specifically, he doubled the number of blocks and put four in each one. Now, we can't run a huge amount of amps through that because it's still in the same circuit, but we're using LED lights and things and security cameras. We're not running anything super powerful through this. No, the cells are on a different circuit. Yeah, we always run the cells on a different circuit. And any tools are usually either battery powered or running on a different circuit.

[37:52] But it's been incredibly useful. Finding and plugging shit in and then we went and did one of the dumbest things i think we've ever done yeah which is in order to make the exit look better we literally blocked our access to the uh light switches that control them yeah yeah because we have two different color um, boxes for the outlets we have black and blue blue should be the the lighting for the haunt The haunt lighting and the black one should be the house lights. Yeah, the work lights. Yep.

[38:30] But we blocked access. Now, in our defense, it was not our intention to block access. We actually did make that a door. Yeah. The problem was, since the door was butting up against the wall, and this is Louisiana, humidity, expansion, other things crept in, and the door functioned not very door-like. Right. And we just never fixed it. Yeah, we just screwed it shut and left it alone. Left it alone. And since the switches were in the on position, all the outlets were on all the time. Yeah. But what that meant was if we needed to bring house lights up whenever we were open, we couldn't do that. Or to do it, we would have to run around and plug in the fucking lights. Well, so we had shop lights with pull cords and I would have to get the step ladder and pull the pull cord so that we could look for shit. Yeah, so if someone lost their wallet or phone or something in the hall. Or if there was a big break, which we haven't had in a few years, but... Well, yeah, we've gotten better about supporting the fucking walls. Well, and testing of the scares before they go live.

[39:40] But yeah no um we now we have moved that panel that's one of the two panels that we moved yep, the result is we have easy access to the light switches and that storage area plus another space for an actor if we want it right and all we have to do are flip the switches to go between house lights and uh hot lights that's yeah i mean he did a great job with it of all the projects he did for us that was easily the best one he did yeah and he taught us how to do it yeah so that was nice it was nice and it was it was a good working with him and this looks it was the one that we didn't have to have someone else read to.

[40:20] Right because that might have happened on a couple other things um number seven, I hate this one. Odd-sized panels and frames. This is fucking insane. Just fucking insane. Most of our panels are classic 4' x 8'. About 20 of them total, I think. About 15, 20 of them. Some are 4' x 6' because we do have the garage door, and an 8' panel will not fit in that area. Right so we often have a couple that fit in that area and those all make sense the four by sixes you know go underneath the garage door the four by eights everywhere else boom beautiful everything's logical and makes sense wait why the fuck is there a two by eight and a three by seven panel, and then an eight by eight what the fuck yeah yeah they we've got some really odd sized panels And the reason was fairly simple, and it sounds logical until you think about it for five seconds, is that every time we had a run we were trying to cover with panels that did not divide perfectly by four, which is a 25 by 25 garage, so we're not going to have that all the time.

[41:44] Every time that would happen, we would just build a panel the custom size. Yeah. We go, we rip-cut a fucking board, build a frame for it, and put that up.

[41:56] And that is fucking stupid. Yeah. That is fucking stupid. Because it uses way more wood. Mm-hmm. And this year with our spine, we had an issue where we needed to extend it two feet more. But, you know, obviously we didn't want to build another two-foot panel. We actually just took apart the two-foot panel when this happened. Right. We had taken apart in December. Yeah. And we took it apart and it was an OSB panel. and we were not reusing that panel. No. Taking that apart was a very good thing. Yeah. That was not a mistake. That was smart. But we didn't have the two-foot panel anymore. And so what we did is we just built a two-foot bridge to connect the last panel to the panels before it. Right. It required two boards, about five minutes to do, and all we've got to do now is find a way to cover it, and there's a myriad of ways to do that. Or and we're also using it as a pass-through at the moment no so i don't know we got ideas on what we're going to do with it but it's not going to be build another fucking panel and squeeze it in there no that is because the problem is when you change layouts those are one-time use panels.

[43:14] You're never going to use a three by seven panel again because your layout even the smallest difference in layout is going to have a very did it's going to have very different needs so it's much better just to build the bridge that you need a certain length and have one of your regular four foot panels at the end right it's so much simpler and we were just making it hard for ourselves that's what we do well I mean we were, We were like carpenters who only knew how to build panels. Yeah. Yeah, I was proud of ourselves while we were pulling apart stuff. We did find one board that inside had a big arrow that said concrete screw.

[43:58] Now, the four other boards that we moved with concrete screws, there was not an arrow. But for that one, we did it correctly. Yeah, you can tell which past us had dealt with even more past us. Yeah. and was trying to have some kindness to future us. Yeah, and that is something I would say to do is put instructions for yourself inside your walls. Yeah, especially if you put a concrete screw in, I would definitely, or some kind of floor anchor in general, I would absolutely mark where you put that in. Yeah. Because it's very easy to forget about those. It's easy to forget, and once the dust and stuff gets inside of there, They're hard to see because they discolor over time. Yeah, and the blue screws that we get are also harder to see for us. So, yeah, that was a very good thing. But, yeah, odd-sized frames and panels, it's like the land of misfit panels here. But we've been slowly getting rid of them, and we're changing our building methods so that we don't need them. And it's so much simpler this way. My God, so much time and money is saved by not building full panels to cover random gaps. Yeah.

[45:14] Okay, and number eight. Final. Wrapping it up. Uh detailing so early on i would you know get it in my head that every inch was going to be detailed and if you can pull that off it's amazing like it is great people who are coming through who actually pay attention will notice it um but that's not 98 of your customers 98 are not going to notice all the small details so one of the things i've had to learn over the years is to roll with the punches reevaluate see what's what actually is possible and what's important and what's important to get the point across of the story you're trying to tell um don't use black walls obviously we've talked about that there are many other ways to do detailing that yeah just as fast or all yeah i mean then this is it like painting a wall black even if if you're using proper sheathing, is actually fairly time-consuming because it doesn't like being black.

[46:20] But there's a million other things you can do to that wall, that blank canvas of a wall, that places don't take much more time and would add a lot more of an effect. Like, honestly, one thing you can do is don't paint them black, paint them white or off-white, and use lighting. Yeah, we talked about that in our Don't Paint It Black episode. But no, lighting does so much of the work for detail. And lighting is something that can be done very fast, especially these days where you have programmable LED light bulbs that are stupid cheap.

[46:52] You just, you know, get that. You can go, maybe this room will look better in red. No, yellow. No, God, that's pink. Green. No. You can go through the center and just go through the colors and see how they change the room. You can, if you have a room with white or off-white walls, you can literally make that room whatever you want with the push of a button. It's kind of cool. Yeah, and we're actually thinking about using something to change the lighting in a room.

[47:23] Completely as people go through it yeah we got a few ideas yeah we got an idea here that's pretty cool yeah we're going to talk more about it once we do some testing on it yeah but but yeah and i understand the frustration because we all really want to have the best haunt ever yeah and we want everything to be detailed like that but hey like you said most people don't notice it i mean yeah and basically this is a this doesn't only apply to detailing it's just be realistic with what you you want to do um because we've we've had to learn that over the years i think yeah we have had we've gotten a lot better about sort of just rolling with the punches and taking our um whatever happens yeah like like the yard display this year we realized we were trying to be too ambitious we've scaled it back but it's still going to be cool it's still gonna be science themed um it's still gonna have some science experiments but we want to quote unquote quote experiments. Demonstrations is the more appropriate term. No one's actually conducting an experiment here, let's be honest. But I'm very, very curious. And it's still going to be funny. Because I would.

[48:32] Want to do something like I don't know what Schwarzschild would look like because he died young, but it would be funny to have a skeleton getting sucked into a black hole and have him look up Schwarzschild in the QR code. Because we're going to have QR codes to where you can get more information about the various scientists. were poking fun of their skeleton form. We've got Einstein. If Richard Feynman isn't in this, I'm going to be disappointed. I demand Feynman. Yeah, I'm pretty sure that we're going to do Isaac Newton with the apple going up instead of falling. And him, his skeleton going like, what the hell? That's actually really funny. Yeah. And talk about his laws of gravitation.

[49:17] Yeah, that'd be fun. Stuff like that. And we're going to have a couple of hands-on experiments. Experiments uh we just got our slinky in for one of them and it is huge yeah to show waves and how how waves travel down a spring type surface it's a really cool thing we saw it at ligo we're we're doing a very scaled down version of one they have yeah because theirs is like 30 feet long yeah and like gigantic yeah it's like six feet tall we ain't got enough yard to do that one let alone loan enough money right but so yeah it's going to be fun i'm really excited about it i'm looking forward to it and it's going to be really really cool but yeah learning to roll with the punches.

[49:57] And learning to not get overloaded with stress and not beat yourself up if you can't just do what you initially set out to do yeah we and that was one thing we both were very bad at and have been very bad at is getting a vision and refusing to stray from it even when it's very clearly impossible yeah and that i think is something that we've gotten much better at in recent years it's going to be a great haunt i'm very excited about it but yeah it's not going to be the everything for us on especially thanks to some of the limitations we had yeah well on that note everyone thank you very much for joining us it's been the last 50 or so minutes with us Please check out more Haunt Weekly We're at hauntweekly.com, hauntweekly.x Twitter, hauntweekly on Facebook And youtube.com slash hauntweekly Until next time, I'm Jonathan I'm Crystal And we will see you all next week for episode 460.

[50:51] Which is divisible by 4, it means it's time to do The News And there is a lot to cover So definitely tune in next week.