Patio String Lights DIY

Summer seems like it is flyyying by! We are halfway through our summer break and soaking up all the sunshine and clear skies this year! I’ve had a ton of questions about our DIY outdoor patio string lights and planters that I shared on Instagram and I wanted to share a quick tutorial with links to the items we used! We put these up for a backyard party for my 40th birthday because I love the ambiance string lights create, but we didn’t want to permanently attach anything to our house (yet). This was a quick and easy free-standing option we have kept up for a month!

Disclaimer: this is a DIY that worked for our space and conditions. We are not professionals 🙂 It is best to review product installation guides and recommendations and/or consult professionals for your project, space and conditions.

Materials Used

I created two shoppable lists (these contain affiliate links) of the materials we used:

Canadian Amazon List
US Amazon List

Veradek Demi Series Round Planter, 16″
Large bag of garden Soil (1 bag per planter)
10 ft. metal string light poles
48′ LED Filamet Patio String Lights Set (White warm)
Medium Stones (purchased in 20kg bags)
Black Lava Rock (purchased in 20 L bags)
Sandbag (we created an L formation and used a Sandbag for extra support on top of the garden soil bag in the corner pole)

The amount of materials you need will depend on the size/layout of your project.

What We Did

The light poles have a fork on the bottom and are designed to go into the ground. When I purchased them, I thought they had a free-standing base (oops!) So we decided to put them into round planters that I loved the look of that we found at Costco. To minimize the amount the pole would sway or shift we added a bag of garden soil (with the soil in the bag) to the bottom of each planter. This is what we decided to test and so far, this has held up well! Without it the pole was shifting around too much and we are definitely not concrete experts, lol.

We punctured the planter with the fork bottom in the center of the soil bag. While holding the pole in place (important so that it doesn’t shift or angle weird) we added medium sized stones on top of the garden soil bag until the planter was roughly 3/4 full. For a low maintenance and nice finish we topped the remaining space in the planter with black lava rock (purchased from a local nursery).

The top of each pole has a Y shaped clasp to hold the patio string lights in place. We looped the light string through and then it’s a matter of tweaking to get the amount of slack you want. We opted for more planters/poles to minimize the weight.