Halloween Project Time: DIY Refrigerator Costume

This year I told my kids we need to keep the costumes manageable.  As in, this mom's not drafting unique patterns and sewing up 4 costumes every free moment in the entire month of October.  I also wasn't keen on spending a small fortune on materials.  So my middle guy decided to be a refrigerator and help make it (and enlist Dad to do the heavy lifting on this one).  Come on and have a look inside our DIY fridge!

Like the real thing on grocery shopping day, it's chocked full of food:

And unlike real grocery shopping, it cost next to nothing!  Here's our costume making story....

We started with a giant box from the basement (thanks Amazon!).  My son & husband used a plate to cut the neck & arm holes.  Dad then reinforced the interior with extra bits of cardboard and foam so it wouldn't tip forward while wearing and would be more comfortable and duck taped a piece of cardboard painted white inside the front flaps so they'd become the doors and we'd have a place to put our "food".

We saved a bunch of packaging from food to decorate the inside. Yeah, creating tons of fake food from scratch would've been cute & more Pinterest-worthy, but that was more effort & time than I had this year.  I'm still trying to recover from last year's 11th hour sew-a-thon DIY Darkwing Duck Costume that the same kid dreamt up.  Some scraps of cream colored felt cut into squares made our empty cheese package look full:

Cardstock peppers filled our produce bag:

Boxes and cartons got trimmed down as needed and glued in.  Dad cut up a foam floor mat to create sections for the freezer & fridge and added shelves by wrapping some foam pieces in aluminum tape:

To get a smooth and even exterior, large sheets of craft foam were glued on and white silicone caulk covered seams where we could add it.  

The wavy outer edges of the floor mat got trimmed up a bit too and wrapped in more tape to make the handles:

For a finishing touch I made a little Frigidaire logo out of vinyl with my Cricut and added that to the front:

To keep the doors closed, my husband added some magnets to the front inside and washers to the top corners of the doors.

Sometimes going wild on making costumes is a lot of fun, but with kids 3 getting bigger + a little one celebrating his first Halloween this year, we needed to keep the time & cost more under control.  This mom is T-I-R-E-D and doesn't want to be so busy sewing costumes that she misses enjoying the season or develop a loathing for Halloween because it equals work.  This one still took a bit more time than I anticipated (slap some stuff on a box - how hard is that? I thought), but we've got it done in time for some Halloween events this weekend and I love that it mainly used stuff we already had kicking around the house. Bring on Halloween!