Our House of Blue Lights

Gosh, we’ve had a hot summer, with plenty of bugs. Odgen Nash, as usual, hit the nail right on the head: “In this fairly temperate clime / Summertime is itchy time. . . . Beneath the orange August moon / Overfed mosquitoes croon. / After sun-up, flies and midges / Raise on people bumps and ridges.”

But as the weather seems to be getting cooler, I’m hoping we’ll also have breezes enough to push aside some of the insects while also making it more pleasant to be outdoors in general. So we’ll be spending more time on our patio. (Such as it is.)

I’ve mentioned our little oasis in Central Missouri before (like when I wrote about playing the zither or our guitars out there), but today I’m frankly just crowing about our outdoor lighting, which I’m so proud of.

Sue and I were recently sitting out there, playing our guitars, and Sue mentioned that we have “The House of Blue Lights.” She hummed a few bars, and I was like, “What song is this?” She said, “Don’t you know that song?” So we had to Google it, and I learned a new song. And I got a title for this blog post! . . . Here.

I started the lighting project in 2018. I basically copied an idea from Kansas City’s Cafe Trio (yeah, one of my happy places). (And yeah, you should really go there and check it out.) That restaurant has a deck/patio with an attractive view overlooking the iconic Nichols Memorial Fountain and looking beyond toward the KC Plaza. I was fortunately able to be there alone one night and noticed the lighting.

They had gobs of those bright, cold LED Christmas lights overhead—enough to cast a cool, cobalt-blue glow over the entire patio. So that people could see (and read the menu and stuff)—but also to create a compelling visual contrast—they also had regular warm-colored patio lights overhead, too. The warm and cool lights combined to produce interesting reddish or even purplish hues where they intersected.

Then—and here they were really inspired—they had a number of rotating LED projecting spotlights (you know, the kind that people use to beam rotating snowflakes onto their homes at Christmas) mounted overhead, too, facing down onto the bar, the chairs, the floor, everything. Because it beamed down from above, it wasn’t in anyone’s eyes. And it wasn’t snowflakes, though—it was just blue revolving and rotating splotches of color. The lights overlapped a bit, so there was no discernible pattern. The overall effect was like being underwater.

I took note of the idea.

I started with the screened-in part of our sunporch. While Sue was out of town for a while, I did it all unilaterally. I put a super-blue LED light bulb into our overhead fixture, and it emits enough glow for that small portion of the porch. Then, I copied Cafe Trio’s method, stringing plain patio lights overhead and rigging our rotating LED projector so it would beam down onto the table and the rest of the room. We don’t use it for Christmas decorations anymore! And it has a little remote control, so I can change the colors a bit: blue, red, green, or combinations of the three. (It looks best when it’s set on all-blue.)

I was so pleased with the effect, I extended it to the backyard patio area. I found a LED blue spotlight for above the steps (you can still see to get up and down them, but it’s blue now). I purchased a bunch of plastic blue LED stringlights and hung them in the lower portion of the canopy of our big yew tree that overlooks part of our patio area.

Next, I strung regular patio lights from our downstairs back door along the walkway to the patio area. I was proud of myself for using some plant hooks for those. . . . And we already had our tiki torches, and the firepit.

We still really miss Vines, but even when it was still open, there were many nights when we had opted to stay in our own little private oasis in our backyard. Hopefully, now that the weather’s starting to get nice again (with, I pray, a corresponding decrease in itchy bugs), we’ll be out there again.