When the movie Wall-E opens, we see Wall-E doing his assigned task—gathering up the left over debris on Earth, scooping it into his body and compressing it into trash cubes. Since Wall-E was going to be at the Halloween house, we thought it fitting to have some trash cubes.

For last year’s Halloween House (Lego!), I created tons of giant Legos. Knowing that we would be doing the Pixar theme when I broke down that year’s Halloween, I saved a bunch of the Lego blocks. I thought they would be perfect for turning into trash cubes.

To simulate the look of compressed trash, I added expanding spray foam (Great Stuff) in a random pattern and then pushed in real trash which I had flattened—empty water bottles, a broken hose, packing materials, etc. Nothing like using trash when you need to create the effect of trash.

Then, we set to painting them. Bich, Brian, Bethany and Carol used a stippling technique to give the cubes more of a uniform gray look, while still allowing the colors of the trash to show through a little bit.

Then, like Wall-E, we stacked them up!