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Professional Outdoor Decorators
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Professional Decorators Can Light Up Holidays
at a Price
Bankrate.com
March 29, 2006
by Kay Bell |
It's the most wonderful time of the year, unless you're the one assigned the task of untangling the lights, balancing on the ladder and spending hours hanging and rearranging your home's exterior holiday decorations.
If you're in the latter category, then this might be the year to give yourself the gift of hiring a Christmas lighting pro. But make your decision soon. Some companies are already stringing lights, and most are booked for the season by mid-November. A growing, glowing business.
Many holiday decorating companies evolved as offshoots of landscaping enterprises looking to expand business year-round. Since they couldn't mow or fertilize or plant in the dead of winter in most places, holiday decorations seemed like a natural next step. The popularity of holiday lighting, however, has prompted some companies to focus only on that service.
Brad Finkle began decorating houses as a hobby while still a teenager. When he saw the amount of neighborly interest in his handiwork -- "They'd say, 'You know what? I can't get my husband outside to do anything. Would you mind?'" -- he knew it could succeed as a business.
He was right. For 25 years, Finkle's Creative Decorating has been a full-time holiday lighting company in Omaha, Neb., and a busy company at that. "We hang close to 1 million lights each season," says Finkle. And in the off-season, there's removing the lights, inventorying, repairing and storing them and consulting with others who want to start similar businesses.
If you want to avoid such hassles, then put in a call to a holiday lighting company soon. Finkle started scheduling existing customers in early September, with installations starting at the end of October. That's also the time calls start coming in from potential new customers. "Most of the new ones wait until Halloween is past then start thinking about Christmas," he says.
Depending on the company, the electrician fee is an added cost, but as Finkle says, it's better than having a display turn into "National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation" with 18,000 plugs in one outlet, blowing out the house's circuitry.
Finkle says the average cost for customers in the Omaha area ranges from $800 to $1,500. "The first year is more expensive because of the cost of buying the decorations," he says. But costs also can go up later, he says, if someone starts out small and decides to expand his decorations in subsequent years.
Finkle wouldn't divulge what it cost one of his more extravagant customers to decorate their place. He did say, though, that Creative Decorating installed 100,000 lights on a Nebraska house. "It was a stone home, so we used hot glue to put them up in the mortar between the stones," he says. "When we take everything off it's January or February, and nice and cold, so the hot glue is hard and the lights just snap off."
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