This is one of those neat no-skill-required projects that can be put together in just a few minutes, but can also be embellished to your heart’s content. It’s nothing but a birdbath topped with a glass round, in which you display stuff. (The sand and seashells in this particular version aren’t goth, but that’s easy to fix.)

If you don’t already have an old birdbath handy–everybody’s grandma used to have one–they can often be found cheap at nursery and hardware stores’ end-of-season clearance sales. You can also ask if there are any cracked or chipped ones available at a reduced price; it doesn’t have to hold water, and an old, worn appearance is spookier anyway. Leave it in its natural state or spray-paint it black.

Round glass tabletops can be found at hardware stores and various dealers online. You can also check thrift stores for glass-topped end tables and discard the rest of the table (or use it for storage).

You don’t have to line the basin with anything, but it might give your display a more finished appearance. Decorative sand and gravel comes in a wide variety of colors, including black. You won’t need a whole lot just to cover the bottom, so a bag of the stuff they sell at pet stores for aquariums should be adequate. You could also try Spanish moss or even something like crumpled velvet.

And there are, of course, all kinds of creepy things to display within. Small animal skulls (plastic props are fine) would look good, as would a smaller-scale version of this exhumation cocktail table. You could also use dollhouse miniatures to create a teensy cemetery under glass.

If the glass fits on top of the birdbath without much overhang you probably won’t need to secure it (although you may want to get some of those little rubber feet to keep it from slipping). However, if you’re afraid of someone leaning on the edge and upending the whole thing, you may want to run a line of a glass adhesive around the lip of the birdbath; make sure you carefully center the glass, because you don’t want to move it around and smear it with adhesive.

Projects don’t come much easier than this, and if you’ve got a collection of small treasures you want to display this is a unique way to do it.

Note: The original photo for this seems to come from a hardware site called Jones Paint & Glass, but I’m not linking it here because my virus software reported a Javascript injection attack.