while you clean it..

soda bottle Jack O Lantern is originally from here..fruit cup Jack O Lantern idea is originally from here..

cute marshmallow ghost bowl is from here.. Gummy bears on a stick.We decorated up the dining room to set the mood, but honestly it turned out pretty terrible other than this crepe paper in the arches.A good test run for the real deal.

Now I know what.to do.. Of course the whole point of the afternoon was to do some Halloween crafts with the kids.. More Pinterest favorites were done of course.

Maybe we’ll save that Halloween overload for another day, closer to the actual holiday..

I think three Halloween posts in a row in August are probably enough, don’t you?.I saved a good 5 minutes per coat with a little technique I called the “beadboard rule of thirds”.

At least that’s what I called it to myself in my head while I was doing it.I basically only painted one third of each board at a time, rather than trying to make the paint on my brush spread out over as much of the board as possible, I just filled my brush, put a few dabs down the center on just 1/3 of the board, used what was left on the brush to do the edges and then came back to the center.

And repeat for the remaining 2 sections of the board.. OK, you think I’m a little nuts right now for telling you all that.It’s just slapping some paint on some boards.