Post title brought to you by a blogger who’s seen better days. Haha? Apologies. I took a break from blogging, but now I have what I believe is a pretty solid tutorial for you! Who doesn’t enjoy some outdoor lighting, am I right?
After postponing for years, we finally added some outdoor lights to our deck, and it. is. fantastic. Not only is it super easy to do, but it’s also relatively budget-friendly! That’s why I’m here—to share my outdoor lighting tips with you.
Materials required:
- A deck. This could be a patio or a porch? A flooring option with one wall?
- String lights. I recommend something sturdy for better durability.
- Fence posts (ours are 12 feet, trimmed to 9 feet). I couldn’t find the exact one online, but I included a shorter version of the one we bought.
- Small carabiners for each connection to the house
- Eye hooks for wall drilling
- S hooks for each pole
- Cordless Drill
- Hacksaw (if shortening your fence posts)
- Zip ties (matching style) for your poles
Alright, let’s begin. You’ll want to determine your lighting layout. Zigzag, square around your area? It’s your choice! I’m sharing some less-than-perfect photos of the actual materials I used.
There are clearly different methods to hang the lights on the pole, but we chose to drill a small hole and insert the S Hook into it. It appears to be holding (considering there’s a lot of tension once they’re up), so I think it’s effective!
After we drilled the holes into the poles and inserted the S Hooks, we connected them to our deck railing. Because our railings are metal, we couldn’t drill into them. We took a leap of faith and decided to zip tie them to the railings instead. We used 18-inch heavy-duty ties.
Once we trimmed the ends, you hardly notice them on the railing. Totally worth it, even if you see them! 🙂
Then, use the eye hooks to drill into your house (it sounds worse than it is!).
Attach the carabiner to the eye hook and then insert the light cord into the carabiner.
I recommend placing the hook fairly high up—around 9 1/2 feet. You want to allow for a little “swoop” in the string lights, and you don’t want anyone to bump their heads.
Honestly, the most challenging part of this entire project is figuring out the light arrangement. I only had to adjust one hook after drilling it into the wall, and I wasn’t too bothered by it. People shouldn’t be scrutinizing your house walls anyway!
Here you can observe the transition from late afternoon through evening, to night.
Wowza!
I haven’t put together a tutorial in about 712 days, so I apologize if I overlooked something! Feel free to check out the video version on Instagram. It’s saved in my stories. Good luck!
