Light it up!

At my house, I have a back deck and underneath that is another area that is pretty neat. When I moved in earlier this year I took a day and cleaned the shit out of that area. I mean powered washed all the concrete, put some furniture down there, and made it nice. There is a light down there but definitely not funky enough for this cat.

I then noticed that the length of the "ceiling" was just exposed beams that were the underneath side of the deck above.

The idea came into my head of party lights to put up down there. But not just regular white lights, of course they had to be the multi-colored ones to represent my multi-colored personality.

Luckily enough I had found a good amount of strands in the house where I wouldn't have to go out and buy any. Dope. We are cooking with gas now.

My first attempt was to put them up with little hooks that you screw into the wood. They would make it easy to replace the lights if need be. Now usually I link to things that I use, but I won't this time because they were absolute garbage and not worth the amount of effort.

Now it was onto things that do a lot of work with minimal amount of effort. A staple gun. You use it just like you would with hanging up Christmas lights. Two key things, get staples long enough to where they don't really pinch the wires of the lights. Secondly, when you start stapling try to aim it well enough to where you don't shoot a staple through the wire. Both of these things will minimize the risk of the wires getting messed up and shorting out all of the lights. 

I was all in, stapling like a bat out of hell and thinking about all the shindigs that these bad boys were going to shine light on. But oh was I a naive little soul. Because I didn't do the most basic of things that you do when dealing with any sort of string lights. 

Plug them in first to make sure that they work. 

So after I had got them all hung up, I plugged them in..........only half of them worked, and the strands that didn't were intermittent with the ones that were. 

Shit.

Luckily there were some extra strands. So as a demoralized and broken man, I took them all down and replaced them with the working ones. Afterward I was about two strands short of completing it the ceiling. 

It still worked for the most part though, and I have yet to put up anymore. I will probably wait till it gets warmer outside.

Underneath there when its dark has this really neat reddish glow. With how it's arranged in that area and the lights, my friends and I spent many a good late night hanging out after getting home from wherever we were that particular Friday or Saturday night, and that's what it's all about.