Holiday Lights on Your House??

[Rich Riddle]

Are any of you going to install holiday lights on your house? I am trying to figure out an easy way to install lights that doesn't involve shingles. Any ideas are appreciated. What kind of lights do you use? The old ones or new looking ones? Thanks.

[Myk Rian]

I tuck the wires up under the flashing for the siding under the eaves. No clips, and they don't fall out.

[Stan Calow]

Rich, I have reduced things year by year so that now, I only throw a few strands of lights along the shrubbery in the front of the house. No more climbing ladders or attaching fasteners to the house. I replaced all the tangled messes of lights inside and out with small LED light strings too.

[Lee Schierer]

Years ago, I simplified hanging our Christmas lights. I installed Cup hooks into the vinyl soffet around our barn and the part of the house we decorate. Now I can string the lights from the ground with a pole with a u-shaped hook on the end and slip the wire over each cup hook in turn. I take them down the same way. The only place I need a ladder is to reach the under eave outlet at the front of the house to plug in the light strings. Digital timers turn them on and off automatically. Almost all of my lights now are LED's that I purchased from christmasdesigners.com. I had to do a little preventative sealing on the lights I bought when I discovered that water could get into a capsule that holds a resistor limits the voltage to each section of the string. If one does leak I know how to replace the resistor to restore the lights. The company replaced two strings under warranty because of this problem.

[Roger Feeley]

My daughters house has 4 20' high columns in front making 3 sections between columns. I put up some hooks and made some bars from 1/2" steel conduit creating sort of theater flies. On the 4th of July, we flew bunting. On Halloween, they flew some sort of creepy cloth. Yesterday, we flew a 5' wreath in the middle section and garlands on the two outside sections.

[Brian Henderson]

I used to, I don't bother anymore. The last time I did, I put some of those net lights over shrubs, but the following summer, I redid the yard and ripped all of those shrubs out, now I have nowhere to put them. So no, no lights this year or probably ever again.

[Gerry Grzadzinski]

Clips on the gutters make it pretty simple, at least wherever you have gutters.

[Bradley Gray]

Years ago I installed galv. screws in the facia below the gutters. I gave up on the 2nd floor lights a few years ago and now I use a 8ft 1 x 2 with a v cut in the end to hang/ remove the lights from terra grounda. We have mostly switched to LED's as they have long life and the low power consumption allows for the lights to go up in one long run.

[Jerome Stanek]

Back when I was a kid we ran a thin galvanized cable and clipped the light to it. We left it there when we took the lights down

[Grant Wilkinson]

I wire tie the LED lights to the nails holding the eavestrough. It works well, but is a bit of a pain. The clips break in the cold.

[Dave Anderson NH]

We take the easy way out and put electric candle in the front windows and a wreath on the front door.

[Rick Potter]

I attached wooden clothespins to the back of the fascia board.

[Mark Blatter]

Normally, I put up lights on the eves. We have a two story house, so it is somewhat involved. As the roof is, I think, a 5/12 pitch I always tie a 1" rope around my waist with the other end tied to something heavy on the other side of the roof.

This year we are not putting them up due to my arm still healing from breaking it. Next year will return with lots of lights.

[Marty Schlosser]

After years of struggling with installing Christmas lights on our house, I certainly wasn't looking forward to the task this year. Hey, it ain't fun playing around with those damned wires with my bare hands to fasten those light wires to the lights, nor using those cheap gutter and shingle style clips which break in the cold just as you're trying to get them in place. Plus, they only last one season... if you're lucky.

Then I came across a great clip system one of our neighbours had and thought I'd give them a go. He told me he'd been using them for the past three years and he'd yet to have one of them break on him. They're made of a heavy duty plastic and have a nice sturdy spring clip which was quick and easy to clip onto gutters as well as shingles for the ones going along the eves. They have a decent sized channel which the light wires snap into. They're marketed by Nova and are available at Canadian Tire. It took me only an hour of rather pleasant work, as compared to a few, painful ones in the past.

Thanks, Canadian Tire!

I wire tie the LED lights to the nails holding the eavestrough. It works well, but is a bit of a pain. The clips break in the cold.

[Jim Koepke]

I installed Cup hooks into the vinyl soffet around our barn and the part of the house we decorate. Now I can string the lights from the ground with a pole with a u-shaped hook on the end

This has been what I did in the past. Since moving to Washington we live in a house that can not be seen from the street. It is also very dark around here at night. So we have permanent strings of lights running from the house, on cup hooks, to the shop, tied to a line strung across the yard, to light the path. We did have LED strings, but they do not last in the weather. Now we use the cheapest strings from the borgs, usually bought in the days after Christmas sales for as little $1 a set of 50 lights. Once a year or so the burned out lights are replaced. The latest sets have been going on 4 years now. I still have 4 or 5 unused sets.

jtk