This was the first home project the roomie and I did as a team and without any help! We have a wonderful backyard that backs up to the ends of other long lots. It’s amazingly private. The home already had a pretty freshly laid cement patio when we moved in and the previous owners left their outdoor dining set for us (your standard, cheap table with four chairs), so we were excited to spend loads of time outside!
My struggle with the space was the massive white wall of the house that lined up to the patio. It needed some life to make the patio feel homey. Mind you, we did not have the means to buy a bunch of beautiful patio furniture for the big patio to make it feel full and inviting. We were doing our best with the dining set we were given and not planning to put any plush furniture out at all.
It all started with the photo below of a pallet plant wall. I’ll say right now, that I’m not a huge fan of pallet furniture/projects. They’re just a little too rustic for my taste, so I surprised myself by being drawn to this image.
How We Did It
You’ll need:
A drill
Drill bit and drill driver
¾ inch wood screws
Handheld steel band cutter
Carpenter square
Perforated metal hanger straps
Treated wood for outdoors
Work gloves
Jelly jars (I love the quilted ones)
Wide mouth canning jars
Small plants, potting soil, river rock, fertilizer
Patience with your partner 😂
The amount of boards and length of the boards will be completely dependent on the wall you’re looking to use. Ours is very tall–10 feet tall, to be exact–which is exactly the way I wanted it to look. We used 9 8-foot horizontal boards (not counting our anti-warp board that was added on the back side later) in two different widths.
1. Put on your work gloves and lay your three vertical, weight-bearing boards on the ground.
2. Place your various horizontal boards out where you think they look best. I placed mine and rearranged them multiple times choosing different distances between boards. Use a carpenter square to make sure your horizontal boards are level across all three vertical boards.
3. Secure each of the horizontal boards to the vertical support boards with your drill.
4. Start placing your candle and plant jars on the different boards to determine how many of each you will need.
5. Unravel your metal hanger straps and fit them around the two different sizes of jars. Make sure to cinch the strap as tightly as you can to the jar before straightening it out. Determine how much of the metal strip you prefer to see on the board(s). Use a handheld steel band cutter to cut all of your jar strips to size at once (remember you’ll have two different lengths).
6. Using one of the jelly jars and one of your wide mouth jars, sculpt the metal strips around the correlating jars to have them all ready to go in advance.
7. Begin securing each of the metal strips around the jars by drilling through a hole in the strip on either side of the jar. Make it TIGHT. These are hanging glass jars, you know.
8. Without jars attached, move the structure to its new home and scoot it around until it looks centered up in the spot you want it.
9. Secure the structure. Ours is secured with longer pieces of the metal straps. The straps are drilled onto the top of both of the vertical supports and tightly drilled into our (flat) roof.
10. Get all your little plants in their jars—remembering to put small rocks in the bottoms, a little fertilizer on the tops, and to give a little drink to each of them.
11. Use a ladder (if your wall is large like ours) to put all of the candle and plant jars in their new homes.
The Pros
I’m absolutely obsessed with the look of this patio wall three summers later. We both truly love it and it gets us even more excited to spend time outside together. Whenever our friends come over, I always catch them using it as a background for their Instagram shots and it totally lights my fire. When we first made it, people would ask us and our friends that snuck it into a shot what restaurant we were at. That was a HIGH compliment in our book since we fully created this wall out of our imagination.
It completely transformed our patio (with the help of string lights) without buying anything else. Its size commands the space, the candlelight provides a moody warm light, and the plants offer up a fresh dose of color against our white home.
The Cons
That side of our home really heats up during the day, so those plants have to be able to REALLY handle some heat. I’ve struggled over the past couple summers to keep my little guys alive–partly because I forget about them during busy times. Some plants do better than others! I’ve had luck with asparagus ferns and vinca vines (I think). Herbs burn right up and don’t do well without drainage. Now I know! The plant lady at Home Depot thinks it’s likely because the glass jars just get too hot in the sun for the plants to handle and I 100% agree.
Our particular wall is really tall! We knew that going in, but that does make watering the top plants and lighting the top candles tricky. I usually keep a short ladder nearby to encourage me to care for the plants more regularly. Whenever my neighbor sees me, though, she always tells me to be careful. 😂
Things to Remember
- If you make one of these yourself, consider a more shaded area.
- Use flameless tea lights in your jelly jars. I originally used real candles and they were so pretty but coated my jars in wax as they burned down to nothing throughout the evening. Instead, I throw in flameless guys now and take them back inside with me at the end of the night.
- Put rocks at the bottom of your jars to keep the plants from completely drowning during rainy times.
- Jars need to come inside during the winter! Last year, we skipped this step and the jars literally exploded—shattered glass everywhere. Oops!
- Wood warps. By the end of its first full season, Ryan added another horizontal support to the back side of the structure near the bottom of the two legs. I would recommend doing this right off the bat with a matching, treated piece of wood so they all age/fade together. It can always be replaced later, as well.
- Jars catch rain. The roomie has yet to be brave enough to attempt to drill holes through the glass, but if you’re up for it, I’d recommend it for the candle jars for sure. The plant jars would leak soil down the structure/on to the patio, so I wouldn’t attempt that.
We love this DIY plant and candle wall on our patio so much. It makes us smile because we dreamed it up from nothing together and because it has held up SO well! It never comes down, so we’re proud of its longevity. If you have any questions about this project, feel free to reach out to me via Instagram or Facebook. The roomie and I would love to help, if we can! ☺️
Disclaimer: All of the photos in this post are iPhone shots from 2017, 2018, and last weekend. We’ve learned a lot about how best to manage our patio plant and candle wall over the years.