“Full service” is the phrase every Christmas lighting company uses, and it does not mean the same thing twice. Two quotes can look similar on paper and cover very different amounts of work. The gap usually shows up in January, when the lights are still on the roof and someone has to pay to get them down.
Here is what full service christmas lighting covers when it is done properly. Six stages, start to finish, with the questions worth asking about each one before you agree to anything.
The six stages
1. Design
Design is not a mood board. It is deciding which lines of the house get lit, what color the strands are, where the runs start and stop, and what the display looks like from the street rather than from the driveway. A roofline that reads beautifully from ten feet away can vanish from the road if the house sits well back behind trees.
The useful part of design is subtraction. On most homes the peaks, the front gable and the eave line carry the whole display. Lighting every surface you own is not automatically better, and a company worth hiring will tell you when something is not worth paying for.
2. Custom cut strands
This is the stage most people never think about and it is the one that decides how the finished job looks. Strands should be cut to your measurements, not pulled off a shelf in a standard length and stretched or bunched to fit. Off the shelf lengths are why so many houses have a sagging run over the garage and three spare feet dangling at the corner.
Red Nose Lites uses custom cut commercial grade LED strands. Commercial grade matters in Middle Tennessee because the season swings from mild afternoons to hard freezes and back, sometimes in the same week, and consumer strands from a big box store are not built for repeated freeze and thaw cycles on an exposed roof edge.
3. Installation by insured crews
Ask two things: are the crews insured, and how do the lights attach.
Insurance is straightforward. People are working at height on your property. If a company will not answer that question directly, that is your answer.
Attachment is the one that costs homeowners money later. Lights should hang from clips sized to your roof edge or gutter lip. Never staples, never nails, never screws into fascia, trim or shingles. A staple gun is faster on install day and it leaves you with dozens of small punctures in wood that sits directly under a roof line collecting water. Clips come off in January and leave nothing behind.
4. In season maintenance
Lights fail. A run goes dark, wind pulls a strand loose off a gable, a squirrel finds a wire. It happens on good installs too. The difference is whose problem it is when it happens on December 22nd.
Full service means the company comes back and fixes it during the season at no extra charge. Red Nose Lites runs a 24 hour service guarantee through the season, so a dark section gets dealt with rather than sitting there until the holidays are over.
This is the stage people forget to ask about, and it is where “full service” quietly turns into a service call fee.
5. Takedown
Every install has to come down. The only question is whether it was priced in from the start.
Takedown after the holidays is included in the price at Red Nose Lites. It is not a separate line item you get billed for in January, and it is not something you are left to do yourself on a cold ladder because the crew that put the lights up was only paid to put them up.
6. Off season storage
This is the stage that separates genuinely full service from the rest, and it is the easiest one to overlook because it happens when nobody is thinking about Christmas.
Red Nose Lites stores the lights. The customer does not. Nothing goes in your garage, nothing sits in a labeled tub in your attic through a Tennessee summer, and nothing has to be untangled next November. The strands are cut to your house, so they come back to your house next season already sized and ready.
If a company hands you a box in January, that is not storage. That is a box.
The questions that sort one quote from another
You do not need to be an expert to compare two proposals. You need five questions:
- Is takedown in this price, or billed later?
- Who stores the lights between seasons?
- If a strand fails in December, who pays to fix it?
- Are the strands cut to my house, or standard lengths?
- How do the lights attach to the roof edge?
Ask those before you compare numbers. A price that only covers design and install day is not comparable to a price that covers all six stages, and the second one is not more expensive so much as more complete. Our how it works page walks through the same sequence in order.
Where doing it yourself is fine
Not every house needs a crew. A single story ranch with a simple front gutter line, a ladder you are comfortable on and a Saturday afternoon is a perfectly reasonable DIY project. Buy clips rather than a staple gun, measure the run before you buy the strand, and you will get a decent result.
The math changes with height and pitch. Two and three story elevations, steep roofs, slate or tile, anything that needs you above gutter level on a ladder in December: that is when the honest answer is to have insured people do it. The same goes for a display you want to look consistent across a long or complicated roofline, because that is a measuring problem more than a climbing problem.
What Red Nose Lites includes
All six stages are in one price: 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, so nothing rolls over automatically into next year.
We have been doing this in Nashville since 2006, with 20+ years of experience behind the crews, and we hold a 4.7 rating from 51 Google reviews. We work on homes and on commercial properties across Nashville, Brentwood, Franklin, Hendersonville, Gallatin, Belle Meade, Green Hills, 12 South, Sylvan Park, Hillwood, Forest Hills, Oak Hill, College Grove, plus Mount Juliet, Nolensville and Murfreesboro.
Getting a price
Call (615) 595-9686 and you can get a price on that call. Describe the house, tell us what you want lit, and we will talk numbers on the phone. You do not have to book an appointment or wait for someone to stand in your driveway first.
If your property is large or unusual, or you would simply rather someone looked at it in person, we will come out. That is an option, not a requirement. You can also use the quote form, or start from your Nashville page if you want the local details first.
Whoever you end up hiring, ask the five questions. The answers tell you what you are actually buying.
Want your home to look like this?
Red Nose Lites designs, installs, maintains and takes down custom Christmas lighting across Nashville and Middle Tennessee. No ladders, no tangled strands, no storage.
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