Fa la la la la (Or, lighting up our home)

This weekend, we decided to brave the craziness of the season and dive into decorating our house for the holidays. This is the first Christmas in our new home so we weren't really sure where things would end up or what we wanted to do for our decorations.

When it came to the outside of our home, I knew that I wanted to put the posts on our front porch to good use.

 

So, I made sure to by lots (LOTS and LOTS) of roping. 

Let me just say that putting up roping is NOT as easy as it looks. Sam and I made sure to stick to our normal project completion timeline (i.e. EVERYTHING takes at least four times longer than we think it will). It took us at least three hours to put the roping and lights up. I know, completely ridiculous.

Anyway, helpful hint #1 for anyone who thinks they may like to put roping on posts: Make sure that your roping is going the right way so that the branches are facing downward instead of flailing in the wind showing off their brown stems instead of the green needles. (Yes, we did it the wrong way at first and it looked horrible.)

We used green wire and a few (small) nails to help hold up our roping and lights. Originally we didn't want to put nails into our brand new home, but the 3M hooks that I bought just didn't stay put outside (I have to say, I'm not surprised, but I thought I would try). Plus, the porch is full of nails that we need to fix up and paint over once spring comes. (I am just itching to paint and stain and put some nice big house numbers up, but until spring my plans are on hold).

This is about two hours into the project.

At first, I tried to double the roping back down the pillar to make it look fuller. But then we realized that we just might have enough to go all the way across...so we did that.

Helpful hint #2: Take a step back to check the spacing of the coils as many times as you can during this process. A few times, we had HUGE gaps between coils at one end of the post and tiny ones at the other. This also came in handy when we did the second post, so that we made sure that our coils were equally spaced.

Step two was the lights. We got to about half-way down that second post when we ran out. Great, right? We were able to pull the lights a little tighter to get it all the way down the post, but if you look closely it didn't quite make it.

I still have a few more plans before this project is complete. We need to get some wreaths and I am still trying to decide if we should put one on the door, or on the peak of the porch. We would also like to get some for above the garage doors, but we'll see... I also wanted some mini potted fir trees to put at each side of the front door. We'll see if we get there this year. It may be something that we have to wait on until our second Christmas in our home.

Either way, it still looks pretty all lit up!

Happy Holidays!

A :)