[Okay, party in the front too.]

Hey there – look at us starting a website for our house and DIY projects, and not updating it for a month again! We are wayyyy better at updating our Instagram account than our website, but now that school’s out, we’re hoping to update our website more regularly.

Okay, back to business. Or, back to the party. Depends on your mood. We’ve been working on a handful of projects around the house lately [most of which are about 94.3% done and we plan to share later], but one of the easiest and least expensive projects we just finished was installing outdoor string lights on our front and back porch.

Like a good mullet, let’s take in our front porch first, which is extremely dark at night. We have a floodlight, along with a light in our mailbox [which we just discovered a few days ago!], but other than that, nothin’. We bought a set of string lights from Target on clearance a while back and had plans to hang them on the back patio of our apartment, but they never quite got there. So, they’ve lived in our basement since we moved in. We had every intention to hang them on our front porch, until we realized that the two boxes we had wouldn’t really reach from one end to another. Cue emergency trip to Walmart.

In order to get the job done, we picked up two boxes of these Better Homes & Gardens Outdoor Edison String Lights from Walmart. We were able to get both boxes for under $30, for a total of 40 feet of lights. We also picked up some basic cup hooks, extension cords, and cable clips. Oh, and we also bought our very first smart outlet (!!!!). We are a solid two years behind the craze of having a smart home. For a solid $9.88, we thought this Merkury Innovations Smart Plug would be a good investment. We can now turn off the front porch lights from our cell phones. Alan. Went. Wild. Who knew this was even possible??

Being able to control the front porch lights from our phones is just about the coolest thing. We can use our Amazon Alexa app, Geeni app, or our Amazon Echo Dot to turn them off from anywhere in the house. Ah-maze-ing.

Alan had every intention of doing an entire tutorial about how we hung these up, but if you know him, you know he gets excited and slight impatient about projects like this. So, we were home from Walmart, and the lights were up in twenty minutes. And of course, it was almost ten o’clock at night as the two of us are drilling holes into the beams, twisting in hooks, etc. We wonder what the neighbors think of us [Let us know if you’re reading this, Jo or Angie!] Anyway, what a difference they make! Talk about boujee!

Onto the back porch! Like a mullet, it’s where the real party takes place, but that’s not entirely true at our house. Since the original set of string lights we bought from Target weren’t long enough for the front porch, we thought they’d be a perfect fit for our back porch. News flash! They were! Here’s a close up of the lights we bought way back in the day on clearance.

Hopefully this doesn’t break any hearts out there, but Target doesn’t sell these exact ones anymore. But, here a link to other Project 62 Outdoor String Lights that would be perfect on a back patio like ours. Anyway, here’s a picture of our back porch after hanging the lights we’ve been holding onto for the past year. Oh, and in case you wondering – we hung these ones up at 10 o’clock at night as well. Isn’t that what normal people do??

Okay, so basically this post is saying we hung string lights. That’s it. Nothing more. Thanks for riding along. Toodles!