The Magical Nest By Night

So I promised some photos of the Nest by night, and here they are!

One of the things I love about living in England is that you really feel the change in seasons. The cold, crisp, misty Autumn mornings, with the leaves starting to turn colour. The even colder winter mornings when you wake up and everything is covered in frost, and I have to race outside in my dressing gown and Uggs and start de-frosting the poor old pot plants on the deck. The first daffodils coming up in spring, and the blissful day when the clocks finally go forwards and we have light in the evening again - and the warm summer days and nights (yes, we do very very occasionally get some nice weather in the summer) when you can sit outside in the garden after work with a glass of wine.

But what I really like about this time of year is that although it starts to get dark really early, it means I can turn all the garden lights on and watch them twinkling through the window while I'm cooking.

When we re-modeled the garden a couple of summers ago in torrential rain (yep, no sitting outside after work with a glass of wine that summer, blimey, we thought the rain would never stop) we took the time to install a series of garden lights, which are wired through to the house so we can leave them permanently plugged in.

First of all, we wired in twelve spotlights, which I then spent hours crawling around in the dark to position just so:

You can see one of these spotlights at the bottom of the picture:

Here's a spotlight trained on one of the big potted bamboos:

We also wired in a few strings of outdoor fairy lights from Habitat, which I strung between the olive trees and bamboos on the decked area immediately outside the kitchen to create a cosy, enclosed feeling:

The spotlights and fairy lights cast a really gentle glow, and the effect of them all turned on at once is pretty magical. Definitely worth all those hours spent wiring them in - connecting all those tiny wires in the little waterproof boxes is a lot tougher than it sounds, believe me!

I'll be back tomorrow with some more DIY stories - have a great evening!