I Needed a Hearse. So Obviously I Made One.

A few years ago, my husband and I drove around to roughly twelve different Home Depots looking for a hearse. That is a completely normal sentence in our house, but I realize it probably requires some explanation.

I had already built our entire Halloween theme around plague, grave robbing, and general Victorian death and misery. There was going to be a cemetery, grave robbers, a horse, a casket, and an entire little story happening across the yard. The centerpiece of all of it was supposed to be a hearse. Unfortunately, Home Depot apparently did not understand how much I had emotionally committed to this plan, because we could not find one anywhere.

We drove from store to store hoping that maybe one had been overlooked, returned, shoved in the back, or magically appeared in inventory. Nothing. At some point during this increasingly ridiculous search, I found a real wooden hearse from the 1800s for sale and, for a brief period of time, seriously considered buying it.

Then my husband asked the question he has asked many times over the course of our marriage: Where exactly are we going to put this thing?

More specifically, where the hell were we going to store an actual antique hearse for the other eleven months of the year?

Fine. Valid point. Annoying, but valid.

So I decided I would make one.

One of my favorite places to find materials for projects is an auction house, particularly because people tend to get rid of enormous pieces of old furniture that nobody else wants to move. I started watching for antique beds and almost immediately found this huge old cannonball bed. It was heavy, awkward, and probably the kind of thing most people looked at and thought, “Absolutely not.”

It was also $25.

I looked at it and thought, hearse.

This is pretty much how my brain works. I very rarely look at something and think about what it actually is. I look at it and think about what else it could become, which is either a useful creative skill or the reason we own far too many strange things.

Once I had the bed, I started building out the rest of the carriage. I added the wooden sides, built a driver's seat, painted everything black, and started scavenging pieces from other Halloween props we already owned. The body of our Headless Horseman eventually became the driver because, once you have reached the point where you are turning a bed into a hearse, recycling body parts seems perfectly reasonable.

Then I needed wheels.

This should have been the easy part. It was not.

Apparently every other person building oversized Halloween props that year was also looking for giant carriage wheels, because I could not find what I wanted anywhere. So I made those too. The centers are little wooden rosettes from Home Depot, the spokes are wooden dowels, and I built out the rest with foam and whatever combination of materials seemed capable of producing something that looked convincingly like a carriage wheel from the street.

Were they historically accurate, load-bearing wheels capable of carrying a Victorian funeral procession through Maryland? No.

Did they need to be? Also no.

They needed to sit in my yard, survive October, and look creepy after dark.

And this is where Halloween decorating gets fun, because daylight is incredibly unforgiving. During the day, you can see every homemade part. You can see the foam. You can see the construction. You can see the spots where something started life as a completely different object.

In full daylight, there is definitely an element of: woman standing in suburban yard next to a bed she turned into a funeral vehicle.

But Halloween decorating is not really a daytime sport.

Once the sun went down, the whole thing changed. We added the horse, the driver, the casket, and the skeleton inside. Then came the smoke, the lighting, the graveyard around it, and all the little details that made the separate pieces disappear into the bigger scene.

Suddenly, my $25 auction bed looked like the hearse I had spent an entire day driving around Maryland trying to find.

That transformation is probably my favorite part of making things. I love beautiful materials and fancy tools as much as anyone, but some of my favorite projects have started with something completely wrong for the job. An old bed. A discarded piece of furniture. Something sitting at an auction that nobody else wants because it is enormous, impractical, and a pain in the ass to move.

There is always this moment where I look at it and think, Wait. I could make something out of that.

Sometimes it becomes furniture. Sometimes it becomes a costume or a party prop. Sometimes it turns into something for the house.

And apparently, sometimes it becomes a hearse.

For $25.

Which is still considerably easier to store than the real 1800s one I almost convinced myself to buy.