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Building an Erie porch display inside the wind and the rules

Erie is one of the most exposed towns we work in, and one of the most tightly governed. Both of those things shape the build. We deliver uncarved pumpkins to your door and put the whole display together on your porch.

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A Colorado porch pumpkin display running the length of a front walk near Erie.

Designing inside an Erie HOA rule

Most Erie neighborhoods run seasonal decoration rules with real teeth, covering how long a display can stand, how far it can extend from the house, whether anything may sit on the turf, and sometimes the colors themselves. We ask for your covenant language before we design, not after. If the rule says nothing beyond the porch footprint, the whole build stays on the porch and steps. If it says earth tones only, the neutral palette add-on at $75 replaces orange with white, green, gray and buff varieties. If there is a start date, we schedule the build for that week rather than earlier. The display is yours to keep, so when the season ends you can move it, break it down or repurpose the bales on your own timing. We do not collect displays.

What the open prairie does to a build

Erie sits on high, flat ground with very little between it and the mountains, so wind arrives with nothing to slow it down. Newer subdivisions make that worse, because the young trees are not tall enough to break anything yet and the streets run long and straight. An unstaked pumpkin on a smooth concrete step in Erie will not stay where you put it. So we seat everything. Pumpkins are bedded rather than balanced, bales pinned, the heaviest fruit at the windward end, and the whole arrangement kept lower and wider than we would build on a sheltered Old Town street. When a serious event goes through, re-staking is a service we offer, and after a wet October snow we will come out and re-stage the build.

Old Town Erie against the newer neighborhoods

Old Town Erie is a small grid of early cottages and mining era houses with narrow frontages, low stoops and mature trees, which is a completely different problem from Colliers Hill or Erie Highlands. On the old streets we build close and compact, using the stoop and the walk, because there is nowhere to spread out and the display is read from a few feet away. In the newer parts the porch is often a small covered pocket next to a wide garage face, and the danger is that the display disappears against the elevation. There we run the line out along the walk and use height, since the pumpkins have to compete with a lot of blank wall and driveway. The package can be the same. The layout is not.

Who books in Erie and what they ask for

Erie books early, and it books in clusters. Once one house on a street has a display, we tend to hear from the neighbors within a week. Most of our Erie work goes in during the second half of August and the first week of September, partly because families here want the porch done before school and sports take over the calendar. The Full package is the most common, with the neutral palette added often enough that it is close to a default in the covenant heavy neighborhoods. Extra hay bales at $25 are popular in Erie because they hold a build down and give shape to a porch that has little of its own. Mums go on well here too, as long as the covenant allows planted material on the step.

Questions from Erie

Our HOA requires seasonal displays to be down by a set date. How does that work?

Send us the wording and we will build to it. We do not collect or remove displays, so the takedown date is yours to meet, but we design so that it is straightforward, with bales that lift, pumpkins that are not fixed down, and nothing that leaves a mark.

Can you build a display with no orange in it?

Yes. The neutral palette is a $75 add-on and uses white, green, gray and buff pumpkins instead. It comes up often in Erie, where some covenants restrict bright seasonal color on the front elevation, and it also suits the gray and stone exteriors common in the newer neighborhoods.

Can you keep everything off the lawn?

Yes, and in Erie we often do. Plenty of covenants here protect the turf and the irrigation, so we build on the porch, the steps and the hard walk only. Bales sit on the concrete rather than the grass, which also keeps them dry and firm for longer.