Professional Christmas Lights vs DIY: An Honest Comparison

DIY Christmas lights get a bad write up from companies that install them for a living. So here is the honest version. Plenty of homes in Nashville do not need a crew. If yours is one of them, we would rather say so than sell you something you do not need.

This is where the line actually falls, and what changes once you cross it.

When DIY is the right call

Single story. Shallow roof pitch. A front roofline you can take in at a glance. Flat, dry ground to set a ladder on. Someone home to foot it. If that describes your house, hanging your own lights is a Saturday, not an ordeal.

Buy more clips than you think you need. Test the strands on the ground first. Run an outdoor rated cord to a GFCI outlet and keep it off the front walk. Add a wreath on the door and a couple of wrapped trunks, and most people stop there perfectly happy. There is nothing wrong with that, and we will tell you so on the phone if that is what your house calls for.

What DIY actually costs in time

The part people underestimate is not the hanging. It is everything around the hanging.

• Measuring the roofline, then buying strands that come in lengths which do not match it
• Testing every strand on the ground, because finding a dead section at height is a lot worse than finding it in the driveway
• Moving the ladder. A roofline gets hung in short increments from a ladder, so a long front elevation is mostly climbing down and repositioning
• Routing cords so nothing crosses a walkway
• Taking it all down in January, in weather worse than the weather you put it up in

Figure on two afternoons the first year and one after that, once you know where everything goes. If that time is cheap for you, DIY is a reasonable trade.

The ladder is the real decision

Almost every argument about professional Christmas lights versus DIY is really an argument about the ladder.

Middle Tennessee in late November is wet more often than it is frozen. Wet ground shifts under a ladder foot. Wet gutters are slick. Cold hands are clumsy hands, and the gloves that fix that make small clips harder to work. It is dark by early evening, so the last hour of the job happens in poor light.

Height matters more than pitch, and pitch matters more than most people expect. A steep gable gives you nothing to lean against and nowhere to stand. A two story elevation over a sloping yard puts the ladder base on ground that was never level to start with. If there is any run where you would have to lean out or stretch even once to reach it, that is your answer. Nothing about a string of lights is worth a fall.

The lights themselves are not the same product

Store bought strands come in fixed lengths. Your roof does not. That mismatch is why so many self installed displays sag in the middle of a run and then leave a dark gap at the last corner, where the strand ran out a few feet short.

What we install is commercial grade LED, custom cut to the measurements of the specific house. Each strand is built for the run it goes on, so the spacing stays even end to end and the line follows the roof instead of drifting away from it. That is most of what people are actually seeing when they call a display professional. It is not brightness. It is a straight, unbroken line at consistent spacing.

How the lights attach matters more than how they look

This one is worth reading even if you never hire anybody. Do not put staples, nails or screws into fascia, trim or shingles. Every hole is a way in for water, and the damage turns up long after the lights come down. Use clips sized to the roof edge or the gutter lip. That is what our crews use and it is what you should buy if you are doing this yourself. Clips cost a little more than a box of staples and they are the difference between a seasonal decoration and a repair bill in the spring.

The parts of the job that happen after installation

Hanging lights is one day. The season is two months.

A section goes dark in the middle of December. A strand works loose after a windy night. Something chews a cord. If you hung them yourself, that is you back on the ladder, in worse weather, in the dark, in the busiest month of the year. Every install we do includes in season maintenance and a 24 hour service guarantee during the season, which exists because things do go wrong and somebody has to go fix them.

Then there is takedown, which nobody enjoys, and storage. We take the lights with us and store them off season, so nothing ends up knotted in your garage rafters. That last part is a bigger deal than it sounds. Storage is where DIY displays quietly die, in a tangle that costs you an hour to sort out next November. You can see how the full process runs on our how it works page.

Where DIY stops making sense

Draw the line about here:

• Two stories or more. Equipment and insurance stop being optional at that height.
• Steep pitch or complicated gables. Nowhere safe to work from, whatever ladder you own.
• Long runs. Past a certain footage the ladder resets alone eat the whole day.
• You want it to look designed. Roofline plus columns plus trees plus the walkway is a plan, not a shopping trip.
• You travel in December. Nobody is home to fix a dark run before the party.
• You do not want the storage problem. Perfectly reasonable position to take.

If you are on the fence, the safety items are the ones that should decide it. Time and tangled strands are annoyances. A ladder on wet ground is not.

What a professional install should include

If you do hire someone, compare on what is in the price rather than the number by itself. Ours covers design, custom cut commercial grade LED strands, installation by insured crews, in season maintenance, takedown after the holidays and off season storage. There are no contracts and no long term commitments. The pieces most often left out of a cheaper quote are maintenance and storage, and those are exactly the two you feel in January.

Details for homes are on the residential installation page, and storefronts and offices are covered under commercial installation.

Getting a real number without booking an appointment

You do not need anyone standing in your driveway to find out what this costs. Call (615) 595-9686, tell us about the house, how many stories it is, roughly how much roofline you want lit and what else you have in mind, and we will give you a price on that call. If the property is large or unusual, or you would simply rather someone looked at it in person first, we will come out. That is your choice, not a condition. You can also send us the details and we will come back to you.

Red Nose Lites has been trading since 2006, we bring 20+ years of experience to Middle Tennessee rooflines, and we are still family owned. We install across Nashville, Brentwood, Franklin, Green Hills and the surrounding area. If the honest answer for your house is that you should do it yourself, we will say that too.