Lighting for Year Round Enjoyment

Living in Southern California we spend  lot of time outside all year around. Even during what we call winter, we are often out on the patio with our neighbors having drinks and sitting by the fire pit. Around Christmas time the colored lights always make the patio seem festive. Getting Agent Daddy to put up the lights for Christmas can be a chore. He is always making up excuses as to why he cannot put them up right now. Then getting him to take them down becomes a problem too.

 So I wanted to find some lights that I could put up and leave up all year round with out looking like I forgot to take them down. Something  that would make the back yard and patio festive or romantic. Thank the Good Lord for the internet. I didn't even have to leave home to go shopping. Of course I went to the usual suspects looking for garden lights and Christmas
lights but really I didn't see anything that inspired me. Then I headed over to ChristmasLightsEtc.com . I wanted to be inspired to do something unusual. Something that my neighbors would see and think WOW,  this is really nice.

There are so many thing to think about when deciding to leave decorations up all year. First is making sure the lights are safe for outdoor use. Sometimes when shopping we look at price and not at where they can be used. Accidentally putting indoor lights outside can cause all kinds of problems that I didn't want to have to deal with. Next I wanted it to be affordable to leave the lights on outside. So LED's are really the perfect choice. LED lights can save you hundreds of dollars each year in lighting costs over traditional lights.

Once I choose the types of lights, I needed to decide where exactly I wanted to place the lights so as to

make my back yard look the best at night. Did I want to use all one color? All White? Or a couple of different colors in different places.

I decided that I wanted to use white lights on the trunk of my lemon tree and a net of white lights over the branches. The net would allow us to still harvest the lemons from the tree but could be easily removed for pruning. I also chose white lights for the back patio.