Well, summer is here which means it's time to turn our attention back on the outside. We built raised beds behind the garage a few weeks ago (and they are doing really awesome), did some more landscaping (planted lilac bushes, boston ivy, etc…) and most importantly hung our Feit string lights from Costco! Easier said than done as we have come to realize.


These string lights are awesome. They are heavy duty commercial grade and come with about a billion extra spare bulbs. For around $50 a box you get almost 50 feet of lights. The only problem is figuring out how and where to hang them.

For our purposes we wanted them over the deck and only had attachment points available on the house. Constructing attachment points on the other side was something we needed to engineer. Really, our options were wood or metal poles to hang the lights from. Wood wasn't attractive and looked too permanent for our taste so the hunt began for metal posts long and strong enough to hang the lights.

Voila! Who would have thought that the solution was both cheap and easy? Heavy duty galvanized chain link fence posts and hardware were prefect for this job. We picked up a few posts, rail ends and tension bands. The rail ends fit perfectly on the posts and are almost meant-to-be attachment points for the string lights. The tension bands screw right in to the deck and hold everything in place.


So after some trial and error with mounting points and heights we successfully hung 2 boxes of string lights! Plugging them in to a wi-fi outdoor smart plug makes turning them on and off about the easiest thing ever. We can use our phones or tell Siri and Alexa to "turn on string lights."