DIY Bird House Halloween Haunted Houses

Learn how to create spooky haunted houses for Halloween using unfinished wooden houses and bird houses! A fun decoration for the Halloween season that can be customized to fit in with your other Halloween decor! 

Hello Crafty Friends! Today I am excited to share with you a fun project for making your own DIY Haunted Houses. I made these last year after falling in love with the ones I saw at Pottery Barn Kids. I knew I didn’t want to spend the money purchasing them, so I set out to recreate them. I found some cute wooden birdhouse at Joanne Fabrics and a fun unfinished haunted house. With a little paint, glitter and paper mache, I turned them into a spooky Halloween village.

You can use any unfinished house to create your own haunted house. By using paper mache, you can cover up holes from a bird house and also add fun and quirky additions to the houses like crooked chimneys, graveyards, steeples and more. Use acrylic paint and marker to add fun details to the houses. 

I was inspired by an old Halloween card I found that featured a haunted house. The card only had three colors, orange, black and white. I decided to make my village using just these three colors and love the way the houses all turned out. It helped me to limit the colors and kept the houses cohesive but you can really paint and decorate your houses any way you’d like. Mine are on the cute side, but you can definitely make them more creepy! 

Below is the quick tutorial for making your own DIY Haunted Houses! Be sure to also check out my other Halloween Crafts for more DIY craft tutorials and Halloween printables!

DIY Haunted Houses

Supplies Needed for DIY Haunted Houses

• Small Wooden birdhouses or unfinished haunted houses
  • A larger wooden bird house would be so fun! 
• Newspaper or white paper for paper mache
• For Paper Mache: White Glue and thin printer paper or newspaper.
• Assortment of small wood or cardboard scraps to build on to the houses.
• Hot Glue
• Acrylic paint and brushes
• Black Sharpie
• Black Glitter

Preparing the Houses

Search your local craft store or online to find wooden birdhouses in fun shapes and sizes. Interesting roof lines and chimneys are a plus!

Before painting the houses, this is a great time to add extra elements to make the houses appear less like bird houses and more like haunted houses. Add extra chimneys, graveyards, church crosses and more using cardboard or scraps of wood. Hot glue things into place. You will also want to cut off any hanging loops from the top of the bird houses.

The wooden haunted house I found came with bats on it, but you could also add your own bats using cardboard and twisted wire. Wrap wire around a pencil to get the spiraled look. 

The next step is to paper mache over the things you added. This will make them smooth and ready to be painted. You can also paper mache over the holes in the bird houses to cover them up. If you plan to paint your bird houses white as I did, I recommend using thin white printer paper rather than newspaper with your glue paste.

Painting the Haunted Houses

Once the paper mache is dry, use acrylic paint to paint the houses. You can paint right over the paper mached parts and they should blend in. You may need to do a few coats of paint over the paper mache, especially if you used newspaper. For my color palette, I decided to stick to a color scheme inspired by a Halloween greeting card I found online that was black, white, and orange. You can use any color palette you wish.

Adding the Details

After getting base coats of paint on the houses and roofs, it’s time to add lots of fun details! Add spiders, spider webs, fences, windows, ghosts, and trees. Use a thin paint brush or a black Sharpie marker to add small details like spider webs. I covered all the roofs with large black glitter, which adds some sparkle!

After adding the details, your haunted houses are all finished and ready to go! I love how they turned out and I love displaying them for the holiday!