Category Archives: Memes

The back yard – a new frontier!

I’ve always put 99% of the lights up in the front yard where they could be seen by the neighbors and passers by. Yes, I want to show them off! That last 1% went round the sides of the roofline to give a bit of a 3-D sense and something to look at while you’re coming at the house from the side. To give the whole light display some depth.

And so it’s been this year, although with the huge driveway on one side and the garage doors on the side, it’s more like 75% in front and 25% on the one side. No worries, it looks good.

But the Forever Home doesn’t have anything in back of it, no neighbors, no houses, just several vacant, graded pads where houses have never been built. You can sort of see it from the intersection with the main road a block away, and you can see it clearly as you turn off of the main road and come toward our street. The pergola with all of the bird feeders sticks up above the cinder block wall.

And that’s a canvas that I had to start putting lights on this year.

As seen from the house, there are a couple of strings of lights hanging down from the support posts of the pergola. EASY to put up and support, no hooks or hangars or anything else needed. And with the low-power LED lights, you can have thousands of lights in a single string going back and forth.

What you can’t see from this view are the first (top) string running right along the top beam of the pergola and facing outward, and the fourth and fifth arcs of lights, which hang down on the outside of the wall so that they’re visible only from the outside.

(I am SOOOOOOO glad that I didn’t drop my phone over the wall taking this picture, leaning way out.)

I now have the rest of the lights that can fit onto this one string and next year I want to add another loop or two hanging below these two, then I want to extend the loops out from the top of the cinder block wall on either side of the pergola. I think it will look amazing and bright and colorful for anyone coming into the subdivision off of the back entrance from the main road.

As always…

Most of this work technically was done yesterday (today was filled with wonderful family activities for a belated Thanksgiving celebration) but yesterday I got distracted by pretty lights in the sky and it’s close enough for government work.

The garage end is good, with the basic foundation along the roofline of the big, colored C9 incandescent lights and the white icicle lights. Both of the old houses were covered end to end with two sets of lights. Not this house. At this end, headed back over the big white gate to the back yard driveway, the colored C9s make it to the corner, but the white icicle lights run out short. Need to get more sets.

My son got the candy canes installed along the driveway, and got about half of the small Italian cedars next to the driveway lit up. I’ll continue with those next time. Behind the Italian cedars is a 6′ cinder block wall, which would be GREAT to display a ton of lights on if I can just figure out an easy, cheap way to anchor the lights to the top of the wall. I have an idea…

The most glaring “gap” in the existing coverage in front is where the colored C9s and the white icicle lights run out WAAAAAY short coming around to the front. Probably going to need two additional sets of both here as well.

I wasn’t sure about putting the old artificial tree out in the front, but I think it looks nice in this corner. Although now that it’s primarily a night-time display, it probably needs a HUGE, BRIGHT star or something at the top.

At the old Scarborough house these blue & white cascading icicle LEDs used to go along about a third of the front of the house and looked nice. Here they wouldn’t even come close to covering a significant portion of the roofline so they would get swallowed up amid all of the other lights. But they’re the perfect width to fit in this section over the front door with the two pillars on either side. I just overlapped them and offset them so that it looks blue-white-blue-white-blue-white. I like the effect and think it will still stand out when I finish putting up the colored C9s and the white icicle lights. And I didn’t fall off the ladder and break anything putting them up there. WINNER!

This morning when I got up I was pleased to see that three of the four timers turned off correctly at 00:30 last night. This afternoon when we got home from our family affair I was equally pleased to see that those three then turned back on correctly at 16:15. Now I just have to figure out why that fourth timer is borked. No doubt it’s a user error.

The other suggestion I’ve had is to put at least a few lights up on the back yard roofline and on the pergola. I’ve never done the back yard at either of the two previous houses, but here we have vacant lots behind us and the rear roofline and top of the pergola can be seen from the main road coming into the subdivision and a little bit from the main road. It wouldn’t be that hard…

As one of my kids texted over the weekend: “How many lights Dad wants”

No inaccuracies found!