Summer will be here before we know it. Pretty soon, we’ll have hours and hours of daylight, warm temperatures, and chances to hang with friends and family outdoors. With those pleasant future plans in mind, we thought it would be a good idea to write a blog post about patio lighting ideas that people could do on their own. A patio lighting DIY!
Patios
Many of us are fortunate to have a large patio in our yards. It’s where we play hopscotch with the kids and let them draw all sorts of fantastical creatures in chalk on the concrete. It’s where we have our barbecue grills and fire pits and our comfy summer furniture. It’s the place we chill with lemonade during the day and a cool adult beverage in the evening.
Some of us have wooden decks where we spend a lot of our free time. Others have just a small square of space that juts out from the back of our apartments. Little more than a balcony, really. Still more of us construct simple spaces to congregate out of pavers, bricks, or cobblestones.
But for all intents and purposes, each of these is, to our eyes, a patio. It’s a space to utilize for relaxation and entertaining. To watch the summer stars come out in a late evening summer sky that nevertheless retains a hint of blue.
So, regardless of the size and type of your patio, if you’re lucky enough to have an outdoor space to call your own, you’ll likely want to make it your own by sprucing it up with some DIY lighting.
Here are three simple ways to DIY some patio lighting ideas. If you have any questions, be sure to get in touch with Prairie Electric.
Patio Lighting: Doing It Yourself
The nice thing about DIY patio lighting is that you don’t need to be an electrician to install some very cool and illuminating features to your patio. There are a great number and variety of lighting features that will work well for just about any patio arrangement. The ones we’ve listed below don’t require special or technical knowledge about installing lighting fixtures
If the three we’ve highlighted below don’t appeal to you, then there are many more products out there that will do the job. Enjoy the process of finding just the right arrangement of lights. And then enjoy yourself once you get down to the actual relaxing under your new DIY patio lights.
So without further ado, here are some DIY outdoor lighting ideas.
Solar Lights and Pathways: Consider solar lights that charge during the bright daylight hours and then brighten up your patio space in the evening. You can use them to outline your patio as well as illuminate the pathway that leads to and from it. They’re super easy to install; you literally just stick them in the ground as if you were planting a flag! Summer nights never looked so good.
Candles: This one may seem obvious, but it’s surprising how rarely one sees candles illuminating an outdoor space. On clear nights — and we have a lot of those here in the Pacific Northwest summer— warm candlelight from below is the perfect accompaniment to the cool light of the moon from above.
Just be sure to keep them protected from the wind. One good idea is to create mason jar lights or jar lanterns; these are just candles placed into attractive — and strategically placed — jars. Place them around the outside of the patio or on tables.
Of course, you can also buy electric mason jar lights, but these will require a power source.
LED Overhead Lighting: Find a collection of waterproof LED lights to hang from a fence if you have one next to your patio. Or you can even set up a simple framework upon which to hang the lights to cover the entire patio area. Turn your backyard into a Tuscan courtyard with twinkle lights or string lights (fairy lights).
What DIY patio lighting ideas have you tried?
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