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The case for handing it off The job looks easy from the ground, then it eats a whole weekend. Between the height, the cold, and the strand that dies the day after you finish, hiring it out stops feeling like a luxury. What the service includes A full Christmas light installation covers more ground than most people expect. First a design, drawn for your house rather than pulled off a shelf. Then the install, done by a crew with the right ladders and the right hardware. Then

The roof edge is the strongest line on the building Look at any house after dark and the outline you pick out first is the roof edge. It is the one line that runs the whole width of the house, and it sits against the sky, so it has contrast working for it. Put light on it and the outline comes back, which is most of what people mean when they say a house looks good lit.Which is why the roof edge is where permanent lighting goes rather than anywhere else on the building. It

Start with why LED Anything mounted permanently on a roof edge has to hold up outside every day. Traditional bulbs are designed to come down. LEDs run cool, draw little power and do not have a filament to break, which is the whole reason a permanent system is possible.None of this is a reason to become an expert. But it is worth knowing what you are buying, because the answer tells you how carefully somebody works. The people who can walk you through it are generally the on

Holiday lighting that does not come down Permanent holiday lights are installed once and left up. That single sentence covers most of why people want them. The hardware is a low profile LED channel run along the roofline and eaves, matched to the color of your trim so it does not stand out during the day. More than Christmas Christmas is what starts the conversation, but it is not the only use. Halloween orange, July's red, white and blue, a team's colors on a Saturday, a

The default answer, and its problem Almost everybody starts with a floodlight. It feels like the right answer. It usually is not. A single harsh source carves the yard into a bright patch and a black rim, and those shadows are worse than the original dark.Taken together, it points somewhere other than brightness. Lower output, more locations, better placement: that is the whole approach. It costs no more than the floodlight approach in most cases, and it works. Coverage, r

A quick glossary The roof edge comes with vocabulary, and knowing them helps you read a quote. The fascia is the vertical board along the roof edge, the one the gutter hangs on. The soffit is the horizontal surface tucked beneath the overhang. The eave is the whole overhang, where the roof extends past the wall.You will not need this vocabulary often, but it turns up in every proposal in this trade, and it is easier to compare two quotes when both are describing the same pa

Everybody plans the install. Almost nobody plans January Holiday lighting conversations happen in October and November and stop at the install date. Which makes sense, because that is the visible part. But the season ends, and then there is a second job nobody scheduled. The people who asked the question up front have a much better January than the people who did not.And that is unfortunate, since the takedown is where a service is really tested. Anybody can hang lights in

What happens after closing People drive past your building in the evening constantly, and what they see is either a lit facade or a dark rectangle. A dark building reads as closed, and in a quieter way it reads as not there. A lit one stays in the mental map of everybody who drives that road.None of this is decoration spending. The building is on display whether the doors are open or not, and lighting decides whether it says anything after five. It is infrastructure, not de