Mother-daughter team take Halloween house parties to 'crazy' extremes

For Chelsea Dufresne and her mother, Penny, Halloween house parties are serious business.

Every year they pick a theme and throw a bash at their home in Edmonton's Lewis Estates neighbourhood, opening the doors to friends and family.

But this is no ordinary gathering. Mother and daughter are radicalabout theirornately decorated shindigs.

Bargain store skeletons and cotton batten cobwebs just won't do.

"There is a lot going on," Chelsea said in an interview Friday with CBC Radio's Edmonton AM.

"We're planning next year at the same time were planning this year. It's constant."

"We're just kind of crazy about Halloween."

• Dark, Deadmonton and Haunted Halloween: What's eerie in Edmonton this weekend

Mother and daughter spend hundreds of hours over the course of the year preparing for the bash, relying on their construction, design and costume-making skills to decorate every nook and cranny of the family's two-storey home.

With impressive attention to detail, each room is adorned with handcrafted figurines, props, billboards and other contraptions.

Chelsea gives her mother a lot of the credit.

"If we come up with an idea, we brainstorm it and then we engineer it," she said.

"If she has to weld something, she welds, if she has to cut something out of wood, she will. If she has to construct something out of clay, she will do it.

"And it's just so cool."

They've done more than a dozen themes over the years, including villains and murder mysteries.

This year, they settled on a story-time theme and constructed a series of fairy tale vignettes, representing more than 20 books and stories throughout their house.

"We try to encompass as much of the house as possible," Penny said.

"Chelsea always gets mad with, because I come up with crazy plans for the next year before the party has even happened. She says, 'Don't talk to me about the next party, I'm still planning this one.' "

• For Edmonton book lovers, Halloween comes early with 'Ghost Box'
• Edmonton's Hospital of Horror a virtual-reality nightmare

Hallmarks of the party are the photo backdrop and a scavenger hunt of puzzles and riddles tailored toward the theme.

Successfully completing the hunt reveals the theme for the following year, so guests have ample time to plan their costumes.

For Chelsea, the magic is in the details and the months of preparation.

"We go hard around July. That's when we really start talking about the specifics of what we're doing, and how were going to accomplish it. But we talk about it all year.

"It's an outlet for our creativity."

Their mutual obsession with Halloween started when Chelsea was just a girl. Every year, after much deliberation and collaboration, Penny would sew Chelsea's costume.

It's something they both missed as Chelsea got older and both became increasingly weary with the more raucous Halloween parties they'd been attending.

"In 2014, I was like, I don't want to go to bars anymore," Chelsea said.

"We're both introverts. So we were thinking, if we don't want to go other people's parties, maybe we should get people to come to our place."