So, onto the backyard lighting. You remember that Matt built our bench seating and table from this post HERE, and we ordered some cushions for it, returned them as they did not really work, and ordered some more. We also wanted to put up some string lights to have a little backyard oasis, and this is the process:
WHAT? A post about home decor? The first since May you say? I know - I'm a horrible home decor blogger. But, it is called "science of married" and a lot of the things I do being married do not involve home decor, haha. But now that I am home from summer travels I want to get back into some of the home stuff, as we usually do in the Fall. i signed up for another Apartment Therapy "Cure" - which is the Style Cure this month. Probably won't get it done this month, as it involves re-styling an entire room, and I'd rather just do some updates, but I'm sure it has a lot of good advice, one I get around to reading it all... So, onto the backyard lighting. You remember that Matt built our bench seating and table from this post HERE, and we ordered some cushions for it, returned them as they did not really work, and ordered some more. We also wanted to put up some string lights to have a little backyard oasis, and this is the process: Way back in June we used string to get a rough idea about the length of the string of lights we would need. We wanted the lights to go from the closest tree to the deck to along the kitchen back wall, and back, roughly 3-4 times. Once it was strung up the way we wanted, I cut it down and measured all the pieces, which ended up being just under 100 meters in length. We didn't get around to putting the lights up until the beginning of August because we were away so often. Matt had made some sort of trigonometric spreadsheet (that's what you get when you marry an engineer), so whenever I say "we" in this post, I actually mean "Matt". I think most of you figured that out already, though. I more had input on the type of lights, arrangement of lights, and height. Matt screwed in bolts and clips to 4 spots along the brick and one larger one to the tree. The clips made it easy to adjust all the wires once in place if we wanted them lower or higher. We originally wanted to get the lights at Target. They had them on sale, but were sold out well before I ended up going to see if they had any. They were also strings of 25 m, and you could attach 3 sets together before overloading. Since they were sold out, we looked at Pottery Barn ones, which were way too much. Matt ended up finding a set of 100 on an eBay "Novelty Lights" site, which were about $90 for the full set of 100. We chose green wire (instead of white) so that the string didn't show at night, and white lights. You can get a lot of variations from this site, and they shipped in about a week. They also included 25 extra lights, as they are quite breakable. We hung the wire first, then added the lights in to minimize jostling. We've had them up for just over a week and none have broken yet! Just one with our patio set - more on this for Matt's birthday post and a family BBQ we had this past weekend coming up!
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KathleenAdventures in married life, cooking, teaching science and new home renovations in the city! LinksArchives
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