I’m deLighted to show you our much more cozy backyard! With help from my dad, mum, and Mina chiming in too, I finally put up the festoon lights from Festoon House I bought ages ago, and I absolutely love them!
I’d been thinking about hanging some lighting for a while, and finally decided to do it this year, since it’s likely we’ll be enjoying this current place for a while longer.
I measured up the backyard, and decided I wanted to go with the zig-zag pattern size to size. It took me a while to decide which way to start the zig-zag, and ended up choosing the direction that meant the power cable would end up on the sensible side of the downpipe. Because of the maximum length (4m) I decided not to use a guiding wire to support the lights, which is usually required over 6-8m. I don’t mind the look of a little bit of sag anyway.
After a lot of research, I decided to splurge on a proper set from
Festoon House, so that they’ll survive the weather more than a year. I chose 20m of the “Black Commercial Festoon Lights - 50cm Bulb Spacing” with “2W G45 Round - 2200k - Dimmable - 200 Lumens” bulbs, and got the remote light dimmer controller as a free gift. Well, actually I accidentally ordered the white set and had to return them (they probably would have looked great, but I was set on the black cable look).
When reading up about how to hang festoon lights, one thing I couldn’t figure out is what you’re supposed to use to attach the lights to. The most common advice was to use eye hooks, but these were either open (which meant the cable could potentially pop out in strong wind), or closed (in which case I have no idea how you get the cable through!). Some places seemed to suggest that you can close the open eye hooks but after looking at some at Bunnings I realised there was no way in hell the right sized ones would close easily.
I decided to buy hooks with little supporting locks from Amazon (like
these ones) and they worked perfectly. At first I was a little worried because the fit was really tight fit once you got the cable in it was difficult to get it back out, but I chose the “loosest” looking 6 and used those and it wasn’t too bad (we managed to put the cable in and out while adjusting a few times).
My dad picked the masonry bit that was the same size as the wall plugs the hooks came with, drilled the holes I had marked up earlier, and manually screwed in the eye hooks. I wanted one side to be a little higher, so we double checked the holes I had marked were in line with one and other using a piece of string and a little spirit level (turns out I almost nailed it with the painstaking way of trying to measure vertically with a tape measure!).
I had previously laid out all the lights on the ground to make sure the design made sense, and noted there should be 8 lights per stretch which made it easier to know we were on track. We hung up the lights, moving the latter to zig-zag between the hooks, then screwed in the 40 lights.
I had the grand idea of putting the light dimer control box at the terminating end of the lights, thinking that it's location in the circuit woudln't matter. Turns out it didn’t so I had to move the control box back to the side where the power cable hangs (I actually called Festoon House for advice and they confirmed it needs to be hooked to the power side, before the lights). All good, I had another extension cord I used for the terminating side, which annoyingly was about 5cm short of just being able to use the light cable termination. Unfortunately both ends of where the lights ended were too tight to adjust in a way that made sense on both ends, but I managed to attach the terminating end in a way that is sort of latched on the fat part of the connector so it won’t move.
I was so happy with the final result!!
So happy in fact, that I did festoon lighting inspired nails, which even have little glow in the dark filaments!
I’m such a dork, this all made me so happy!
