Ein Kleiner Deutsch Biergarten

My wife and I visited München several years ago. I had recently discovered the world of homebrew and had been branching out into new styles. German beer seemed fascinating. I loved the way every major town seemed to have their own style, and servers in each town might get huffy if you ordered a rival town's beer. For example, going to Köln and ordering an Altbier (the style from neighboring Düsseldorf) was supposed to be anathema. While we were in München, I noticed that nearly every restaurant and hotel with enough space had a special garden for the bar patrons. It was usually surrounded by a little fence and had climbing vines over the gates. Very, very gezellig. As the sun went down and we wandered through the cornfields to the only open restaurant in the area, these beer gardens started lighting up in the gathering gloam. The moment was magical. Five years and two children later, I started looking into transforming our little patio into somewhere we could enjoy the gezelligheid of the German beer garden. 

 

First would come the lights. This is easily the cheapest, most immediate payoff. I installed a weather-proof outlet into the outdoor circuit in a box that previously held a defunct motion-sensor light. Two things that make houses look cheap and reflect poorly on a neighborhood are chain-link fences and motion-sensor lights. We moved into this house in 2008 and almost immediately took the gates off our fences. I hated opening the gate to get into the driveway. My siblings and I had to do this for years at my parent's house. I always hated it, and I wasn't about to do this as an adult. Don't get me started about that walnut tree; but I digress. A year or two into living at this house, we took down the chain link from the fence frame and sold it. I was pleasantly surprised to find people on craigslist that wanted this material and would even give me money for it. I had googled how to get rid of chain link when the suggestion appeared. Perfect! We painted the fence frame purple and let it be. A few years later, in a fit of nostalgia, I drilled holes in the posts and strung nautical-grade stainless wire rope through them to make a kind of cattle fence. The girls love bouncing on this, we grow plants along it, the fence generally became more of a fence with the wire in place. I think I left a pictures of it most of the way down on another page. You can also see the pathway project and the door of the garage project there. The final step was getting rid of the motion sensor lights on the house. This isn't complete yet. I removed the one on the front of the garage and replaced it with a carriage lamp. I removed the one on the corner of the house and replaced it with a switchable outlet. I have one on the side of the house I'm know I want to replace, but not certain what to install in its place. 

  Back to lights, I had looked around for something that would stand up to weather and also stretch the 30+ feet from house to garage without too many links. I saw a few strands at Target, but you couldn't connect more than a few and they were only 15 feet long. We saw solar-powered strands as well, which seemed like a nice idea since they wouldn't require an outlet and would be pretty light weight, but these never seemed that bright at night, especially after a year or so. Enter Costco. We found some really heavy duty strands with cables like extension cords and full sized light sockets. 48 feet long! They were $60 per strand, but they came with a dozen extra bulbs. This turned out to be helpful since I've broken a few already swinging things around over my head. Of note, this is also how I broke the light fixture above the bunkbed when I was 6. In that particular case it was a belt with a hot wheels car velcroed to the buckle. Some people never learn. When I first strung up the lights, I ran them in an X-pattern. I used zip ties and the same stainless cable I'd used for the fence. There was some satisfaction in using the same material connectors including eyescrews and u-bolt cable clamps. Though each end was close to 10 feet off the ground, with the help of some struts I added to the walls, there was enough weight in the middle that the light bulbs were hitting my head as I walked beneath. 
  

To resolve this, I ran some green vinyl-coated galvanized wire rope from the tree branch approximately above the center of the X. The green coating lets the wire blend into the foliage above. This tree branch also supports our tree swing. At the bottom of of the wire I attached a carabiner in case I want to take the lights down during the winter. 

Below are some pictures of the final result both during the day and the night. 

Et voilà!