Gallery

The standard to hold an installer to.

Warm white rooflines. Garland hung straight. Glow that reads from the street and feels right from the driveway. This is the lighting language worth asking for — and what to point at when you compare quotes.

Two-story shingle home with warm white C9 bulbs tracing every roofline at night — The full roofline
C9 warm white · every ridge and eave

Snow-covered gable at dusk with evenly spaced warm white bulbs along the trim — Fresh snow, warm glow
C9 warm white · gable trace

Close view of warm white C9 bulbs clipped in a straight line along a snowy roof edge — Spacing you can measure
Commercial clips · no staples, no guesswork

Bay window and balcony wrapped in lit garland beneath a traced roofline — Garland, done properly
Lit garland · balconies and bays

Porch columns wrapped in warm white lights with garland along the railing — Columns and rails
Wrapped columns · railing garland

A-frame cabin glowing warmly between snow-covered evergreens at night — Glow that carries
Warm white · landscape accents

Reference photography by Brooke Balentine and Gautam Krishnan via Unsplash, and via Pexels — the finish standard this page describes, not photographs of work arranged here.

How to read a quote

Six things that separate a professional install from a weekend one.

Two quotes for the same roofline can differ by thousands, and the photographs above are what the expensive one is buying. Each item below is something you can ask about before you sign, and something you can see from the driveway afterwards.

Nothing penetrates the roof

Professional work clips to the gutter lip, drip edge, or shingle edge. Staples, nails and screws create holes that outlast the season and the display, and they are the most common cause of a lighting job becoming a roofing bill.

Ask: What are you attaching to, and what happens to the fixings at takedown?

Bulbs are cut to the run

Custom-cut lines mean each run is measured and terminated for that specific eave, so spacing stays even and there is no doubled-back slack at the end. Retail strands sized to the box are what produce the bunched corner and the gap by the chimney.

Ask: Are the lines cut to my rooflines, or standard lengths?

One colour temperature, end to end

Warm white from two manufacturers rarely matches, and the eye reads the mismatch from the street even when each run looks right alone. A single product line across roof, trees and ground pieces is what makes a display read as one thing.

Ask: Is every element the same bulb line, including replacements mid-season?

Connections are sealed and planned

Circuits get planned so no run is overloaded, junctions are sealed against wind-driven snow and meltwater, and cords are routed along lines the eye already follows rather than dropped down the front of the house.

Ask: Where do the cords run, and how many circuits is this?

Mid-season failure is somebody's job

Bulbs fail, squirrels chew, and ice pulls clips. A professional arrangement names who returns, how fast, and whether it is included — a season is roughly six weeks of weather, and a dark section for four of them is the usual complaint.

Ask: What is the response time for an outage, and is it in the price?

Takedown is priced in, not promised

Removal in the thaw, with the same roof-safe method as the install, plus labelled storage if the installer owns the materials. A quote that covers only the install is not comparable to one that covers the season.

Ask: Does this number include takedown and storage, or is that separate?

Roof material decides several of these before anything else does — what your roof means for a light install covers slate, cedar, tile and metal specifically. For what the work costs and why, the Cost Index publishes modelled ranges town by town.

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