Party Lights

May is one of our favorite months. The rainy seasons rapidly draws to a close which means plenty of warmth and sunshine which means we start to transition our lives outdoors. On top of that, it's also Alison's birthday month! This year we celebrated her 30th birthday with a 2-person yard party in our yard. But no yard party is complete without party lights, so we had to get to it!

We have modeled our house in the CAD program SketchUp which we use for most of our projects. It is helpful for designing and planning everything out and helps work out a lot of potential problems that can arise during construction/assembly/layout of whatever it is we're doing. And yes, we even used it to help us decide on party lights.  There are plenty of lights to choose from but we opted for these. We liked the spherical shape of them, the fact that they are LED, and also the spacing between bulbs (which is 2ft for this strand). There are some strands out there with 1ft spacing but after modeling it in SketchUp we realized how overkill that would end up being. We also used the CAD model to determine just how many feet of lights we would need. With a little bit of good design, and a lot of luck, our requirement came to 195ft, or almost exactly 2 strands.

While we we're able to use the fascia board on our house to anchor the lights, we needed a sway to hold up the lights on the far side of the yard. We looked around for something that was specifically designed for this purpose and didn't find anything. The best option we found on Amazon were 92" Shepard's hooks for $40. While not the worst solution in the world, we opted to make our own poles instead.

We had used electrical conduit in previous projects so we decided to start there. Electric Metallic Tube conduit is great as its quite strong and rigid but its also pretty darn cheap. A 3/4" tube that's 10ft long is just under $7 at the big box stores. The PVC version of the tubes are even cheaper. And though the PVC tubing might not be rigid enough to hole the lights up, it will make the perfect holder for our EMT tube.

We ended up with 1x 10ft PVC conduit with a 1" diameter. We needed 4 poles total to hold up all the lights so we cut the PVC conduit into 4 equal pieces at 2.5ft each. We marked out the location of where we wanted to place the poles, and pounded the PVC into the ground. If you have a rubber or plastic mallet, this would probably work great to do this. We just covered the PVC with a piece of scrap wood and pounded it with a standard hammer. We left around a foot or so of the PVC exposed above ground.

For each pole we used a 10ft EMT Conduit with a 3/4" diameter. We used an awl to poke a starter hole a few inches down from the top and finished the hole with a drill. Then you just have to screw in a little hook and you're all set! There are plenty of options for hooks and clasps so be creative and find something that looks good to you. You can also choose to find a cap for your conduit if you're so inclined. It will give the pole a bit of a cleaner look to it. We opted not to cap the poles. You can also choose to paint your conduit and now would be a good time to do it if you so choose. We decided not to but a little paint could definitely spruce it up a bit.

Now you just have to stick the EMT conduit into the PVC holders and you're all set. We had a bit of a lean to our poles to we ended up zip tying them to the fence to keep them more upright. Once this was done it was just a matter of stringing up the lights and plugging them in! We love these lights and they provide a ton of light. This whole project doesn't take more than an hour or so to do and the results of the lights are dramatic. We plugged our lights into a smart outlet and have them set to turn on in the evening and off before we go to bed which helps keep the party going every night!