Thursday, October 31, 2013

How to Make a Kid Janitor Halloween Costume

My son loves to push anything that will move and using all kinds of brooms to sweep indoors and out. This fasinatiion may not be around for long, so I thought I would take advantage of his current passion with his Halloween costume this year. Let's have the little guy be a JANITOR! How fun would that be? When I told friends and colleagues what we chose for the little man, the reaction of many was like, what?! I know, you probably haven't seen too many toddler or even kid janitors over the years, but let's do it and do it right!

After searching long and hard for ideas and samples of a janitor Halloween costumes, I came up empty handed. Didn't seem there were many images on Pinterest or the internet to help me form an idea of what has been done, or showing me what I could do. Of all places I ended up finding inspiration from the TV show Scrubs. The character, Janitor, always wore his uniform on the show, so that is what I went with. Now finding toddler coveralls was another matter.

So what we went with was: a chambray shirt from Old Navy, thick navy blue canvas cargo pants from Goodwill, a custom patch from an Etsy vendor, and boots that we already had. To accessorize, we added his toy keys to his pants, and an ID badge. So the total costume was about $21 (as we already had about three of the things).



Then we picked up items and created the janitor cart. It was another one of those items that needed to be made ourselves as the closest thing I could find was the Melissa and Doug Housekeeping Cart, but I wasn't about to pay $150. The blue metal cart was from Goodwill, the mop (a carwash sponge) was from a big box retail store, the thick yellow canvas pockets was fabric from JoAnne Fabric that my mom sewed for me, the garbage bags were black doggie poop bags, and some smaller scrub brushes were from WINCO. Then we just added some things we already had like blue rubber gloves, a plastic dust pan and broom, a spray bottle, and rags. Total cost was about $25-$30.

 



We did put window insulation around the perimeter of the metal cart for injury prevention to himself and our walls, but it was easily concealed by the black garbage bag. There you have it, an adorable Janitor who actually won Best Costume at one of the festivals we went to!