Lighting Up Old Glory and the Big Backyard

We live on the edge of town with a two and a half acre yard. Our property backs up to a big Nature Preserve and some beautiful DNR Wildlife designated lands.

Because of that, we do get a lot of wildlife in our yard at times: Some beautiful big sandhill cranes, fat strutting turkeys, and an abundance of local birds at our bird feeders.  We even have a resident groundhog that lives next door, and wanders through from time to time.

Often in the evening, and into the night, we are visited by an occasional fox, coyote and many multiple deer. We really like watching them, but we don't always appreciate them chewing off the select variety of bushes or flowers around the house. But, oh well, we spray those and sprinkle them down with cayenne pepper and that seems to help. But we really do enjoy watching the deer the most...

And so do the dogs! 

Now that we put the fence up alongside of the house, they can no longer bark their fool heads off at the neighbors or the neighboring dogs. It really has helped a lot. But the dogs do enjoy looking at the deer out the back. They bark a few times, but they really intently just sit and watch them.

It has become their "entertainment".

The deer come in and wander around underneath our bird feeders licking up whatever little bits are on the ground. All of the feeders are tall enough that they can't reach them anymore. We took care of raising the feeders up out of reach. But we do enjoy seeing the deer stroll on through. Then they leap gracefully over the fence and go to the neighbors house to munch on their apples that are strewn on the ground under their apple tree.

Another thing we have noticed, with the gravel road that goes along the back side of our property, we've noticed a few cars driving back there and turning out their lights or driving slowly with a flashlight. Not sure if they're shining for deer, prospective deer hunting, or if they are up to some mischief. But we thought maybe some extra lights along in the backyard might help to deter any shenanigans that someone might have in mind??

We tossed back and forth with a couple different lighting fixture ideas, and then Steve came up with a spectacular one!

We had a beautiful 18 ft tall flagpole that had been a housewarming present from Steve's dad. He gave it to us back in 2012 for our house down in Chilton. We cut it off from the ground there and brought it with us to this house in 2019. We just never got around to putting it up yet, because we weren't sure if we were going to plant trees in the front yard or did we want the flag pole in the backyard? We do like flying the American flag....  Instead we just put a pole type flag up front on a porch post for now. 

Well, Steve decided maybe we could put the tall flagpole in the backyard, and attach some outdoor lighting to the top of the flagpole! Then we could run power up the inside of the pole and bury the cable underground to power the lights. Bingo! What a great idea!

He had a lot of the supplies he needed already on hand at home, and a few things he ordered from the local hardware store and could do a curbside pickup.  

I wasn't quite feeling up to snuff yet to help much.  I am still coughing, over 3 weeks now of being sick, but starting to feel better.  I am just not ready to help with the heavy stuff. 

Steve got out the post hole digger, and the wheelbarrow, and got to work. Dig dig dig the old fashioned way, down in the center of the flower garden in the backyard.  He had a partial bag of cement in the garage and he took care of cementing in the bottom support sleeve for the pole.

Now he had to wait

 for the cement to firm up 

and cure overnight.

He hates waiting...

This morning he did a curbside pick up order of the supplies he needed. The first one was a dusk to dawn photo eye sensor unit.  He attached that to a round metal electrical box cap.

Then he got a round outdoor metal electrical box and added 4 exterior type light sockets. He started assembling all of the pieces in the garage and wiring everything together. I popped out in the garage just to take this picture of what he was working on first thing this morning.

He had a hundred foot roll of underground power cable to be buried once everything was hooked up. We unrolled it carefully and had more than enough to do the job. 

Now it was time to start putting together the wires through the bottom of the base with a grommet so wouldn't wear down on the wire.  Then I helped him run the wire through each piece of pole and assemble the pieces together. 

I also got out the beautiful American flag that came with this pole. It isn't just a printed one, rather it is a beautifully stitched embellished silky flag that looks absolutely radiant when the light shines through it. The stars are embroidered and each each piece of fabric is carefully joined together.

Steve took care of the connections down at the base and made sure everything would be sturdy and ready to go once we started putting up the pieces of the flagpole.

At the other end, he assembled the lighting fixture and securely attached it to the top cap of the pole. Then he had to attach the photo eye unit that is seated on top with a rubber gasket to keep out any moisture. He inserted four LED flood light bulbs that are each equivalent to 65 Watts if they were incandescent. In reality, they are only 8 watts each, so the total light fixture is only drawing 32 watts. But the light illuminated, which is a warm 3000 K range, is equivalent to 260 watts of light.

Here is a little YouTube video that I shot of him actually raising the flag after we set the pole into place:

It sure looks nice in the backyard and it is a wonderful dual use of the flagpole, to also be our yard light~ 

A breeze came in from the north and fluffed out Old Glory into is beautiful majesty flapping in the wind.  We called up Pops Pfundtner to tell him how nice his gift is, to be flowing in the wind again.  He says he loves to sit on his back deck and watch his too.  

Since the flower garden is centered directly off the back of the house, when sitting from inside the She Shed we can look right out at the flagpole.  With the yard now illuminated at night, we can look out the big windows from our chairs.

Sure enough, it was only 6 p.m. this evening, in wandered a deer to check it out just as the light had reached the point where the photo eye kicked in. The deer looked up at it as if to say "What are you doing here?"

Probably all the better for them to see to eat!

On edit- while writing this blog post, three more deer came in to see what was going on, and each one walked DIRECTLY up to the pole and sniffed it!!!! One is a young buck!  Then a white neighborhood cat strolled through too.  We are having a lot of activity in the last hour or so. 

Now it's total darkness and the backyard is illuminated so nicely from the lights. We are not sure yet if we need to aim them up or down or away or what direction. But we will get it figured out.

Wowzers! It sure lights up the whole backyard nicely. I think Steve's idea gave us exactly what we wanted. Not only does it give us something to look at out of the windows at night, but I think it adds to the security and safety of our backyard as well.

~~~~~~~

A long time ago, while we still lived in Chilton, we had this solar-powered LED light on our flag pole to light it up at night. It's not nearly as bright as the new backyard setup now. So I had an idea. I brought this solar LED light up into the front yard and clamped it on to one of our front porch spindles.

Once it got dark, now it can shine upward on to our front porch flag, as well as our house number. It looks kind of cool, plus it's a safety feature so someone can find our house at night by the house number if needed.

Well, this may not have been a huge project. Since we are both still recovering from being ill, our projects are short and sweet. But bit by bit we find things to do to keep ourselves occupied and busy.

We have a couple more projects coming up that are going to be a little bigger, and we actually have hired somebody to take care of a couple things. More on that later!