DIY String Light Posts

Hi friends! It doesn’t have to be expensive or fancy to be cozy! We added string lights over our backyard patio to create the perfect cozy hang out spot! ✨

When we first bought our house, the bushes were overgrown and the rest was bland and boring! We tore out a whole bunch of bushes, added some new plants and crushed stone with a paver border.

Drab to fab! 😅 In a perfect world, I would love to have a pergola or maybe the roof extended over the patio, but those are not right now things.

So for now, we did string light posts! I didn’t want the posts to be permanent, so we concreted them in buckets and then buried them, instead of digging a hole and dumping the concrete in the ground. This way we can easily pull them out later. If you aren’t worried about that, you could omit the buckets! We started by spraying the inside of a 5 gallon bucket with WD-40 to get it all slicked up, then we dumped about a 1/4 of the bag of this fast-setting concrete mix in, sprayed in some water from the hose and stirred it up with a shovel. We kept doing that until the bag was empty - we used 1 bag of concrete mix for each 5 gallon bucket. We made our concrete a little soupy, so we could easily wiggle our 4’ x 4’ x 10’ treated post down to the bottom of the bucket. We made sure the post was centered and then put a piece of scrap wood long enough to sit on top of the bucket in front of and behind the post to hold it there. We did the same process twice, since we needed 2 posts. Also, the fast-setting concrete sets up in 20-40 minutes, so don’t take any breaks!

We let the concrete sit over night just cause we are worriers and then the next morning we cut the buckets with my little hackzall. I didn’t get any photos of the posts with the concrete blobs on the bottom, but I’m sure you get the picture!

I stained the posts with Minwax Special Walnut and then we buried them, with some supervision. 😝

I added these little hooks to the top of each post and in 3 spots on our fascia to string the lights from the house to the posts. I used my drill and a drill bit a little smaller than the threads on these hooks to pre-drill my holes.