If you’re reading this in your front yard tangled up in 22 strings of holiday lights while the rest of your family is inside sipping cocoa, you got here just in time.
Need a hand?
How much does it cost to hire someone to put up Christmas lights? Here in Idaho Falls, plan to spend $1,500 to $2,500 to outline your roof line, with extras like lighted wreaths and wrapped trees costing an additional several hundred dollars.
Let’s learn more about professional holiday lighting.
What do you get for your money?
When Outback Landscape installs your outdoor holiday lights, you own the lights. Then, in subsequent years, you only pay the installation and storage fees, which is about 25 percent less than your initial cost the first year.
Your professional holiday lighting cost includes design, installation, removal at the end of the season, storage for the coming months and any service calls needed while the lights are up. If a bulb goes out or something comes loose, we’ll pop over and fix it at no extra charge.
Professionals also use professional-grade products — not the sometimes-flimsy lights found at your local home improvement store. The lights will hold up better in the elements, meaning less downtime and maintenance during the season.
But maybe the most important thing you get when you hire a pro is their experience. Anybody can hang lights, but not everyone can do it safely and make it look great. (More on this in a bit.)
How much does it cost to hire someone to put up Christmas lights? The exact price will depend on the size of your home or business, how tricky it is to light and how many elements you want to illuminate.
But here’s a look at a few basics:
Imagine your home’s roof decked out in a perfect line of holiday lights, highlighting your peaks and gables and offering a welcoming, festive glow.
Expect to pay $1,500-$2,500 to have this done for a 4,000-5,000-square-foot house.
A big lighted wreath with a festive red bow offers a cheerful welcome during the day and a magical twinkle at night.
Plan to pay $350-$750 for a 36-48-inch wreath.
Wrapping outdoor trees in a swirl of twinkling lights transforms your home into a magical winter wonderland.
What does it cost? Expect to pay $250-$450 for a 10-15-foot-tall tree. The cost increases for trees taller than 15 feet.
“Tight wrapping” evergreens is a popular request, rather than a loose spiral of lights. The tighter you want the lights to be wrapped around the tree, the more strands it will take and the higher the cost will be.
At Outback Landscape, we only use LED C9 bulbs for outdoor holiday lighting in Idaho Falls.
C9 bulbs are large, cone-shaped holiday light bulbs about 2.5 inches tall.
They’re a popular choice for large-scale outdoor decorations, such as rooflines and tall trees, because their size and brightness make them visible from a distance. You don’t want Santa to miss your house.
LED lights save a lot of electricity, but there are other benefits, too:
LEDs produce almost no heat, so they're always cool to the touch and safe for children and pets.
The quality of LED light has come a long way since it first came on the market. Today’s LEDs produce a much warmer white light than the blue-ish tint of earlier versions.
Many LED light sets are rated to last tens of thousands of hours — well beyond a traditional set of incandescent mini lights that may last just a season or two before you have to replace them.
Sure, it’s cheaper to tackle this project yourself. But when you pay a pro, you’re getting a lot more than the oohs and aahs of pretty holiday lights.
Why hire professionals?
Outback lighting crews cut the strings of lights to fit your house or business exactly. No weird extra length dangling, no struggling to hide the extra bulbs that hang over the edge. Everything is a perfect custom fit.
Christmas light installation is pretty treacherous. We’re talking tall ladders, balancing on steep roofs, slippery surfaces. Toss in electricity, and you have a whole host of potential predicaments.
Outback’s expert crews have the correct gear, the safety training and the years of experience to do this job safely, every time.
Wouldn't you rather watch safely from inside, nibbling Christmas cookies, while our crews scale the ladders out in the cold?
At Outback Landscape, holiday lighting includes convenient storage. We store all your lights until the next holiday season. You don’t have to store them, or that bulky 48-inch wreath, in a bunch of big plastic bins taking up precious space in your garage. No stubbing your toe every week on a pesky storage tub when you’re just trying to get to the lawn mower.
If you drag out last year’s tangled jumble of holiday light strings and every one of them actually works, it’s a Christmas miracle, right?
Then you happily haul them all up the ladder to your roof, painstakingly install them with your frozen fingers, climb back down — and discover three bulbs are now out.
Cue the swear words. Or, let us worry about it.
If you leave the Christmas lights installation to us, and a bulb blinks out, we'll be over in reindeer speed — within 24 hours — to fix it.
It’s a crazy busy time of year. Your list is longer than Santa’s.
You don’t have time to untangle strings of lights, shop for new ones to replace the ones that don’t work, drag the ladder out of the garage, then figure out what to put where.
How many lights do you even need? That shrub by the front porch will probably take about 100 lights, right?
Then you turn them on and realize it really needs 300. Another trip to the crowded store — fun!
Or, leave the pesky measuring to us. Why ruin a perfectly good holiday mood with math?
Call us, and we’ll have the whole project done in a few hours. Go watch your favorite holiday movie. Finish up that shopping. Bake some cookies. All you have to do is enjoy your fabulously decorated house.
Once you’ve made the smart decision to trust your Christmas lights installation to the pros, check out a couple helpful tips:
Make sure the company you hire for holiday lighting in Idaho Falls has liability insurance and workers’ compensation. If they don’t, and one of their employees gets injured on your property, you could be held responsible.
Book your holiday lighting early, before Thanksgiving. The best companies book up fast.
Plus, icy weather can move in early here in Idaho Falls, posing riskier conditions for outdoor lighting crews that can make your installation more difficult and expensive.
It’s smart to schedule your Christmas lights installation early, well before Thanksgiving, even if you don’t plan to turn them on until you’ve finished your pumpkin pie.
Looking forward to searching your attic for decorations, untangling endless strands of lights and trying to figure out which bulb has gone bad?
We didn’t think so. Leave the holiday lighting in Idaho Falls to us.
At Outback Landscape, we love this time of year. We have the best holiday outdoor lighting ideas and the expertise to make your home a twinkling holiday wonderland.
We’ll help you create a dazzling display, untangle the lights, climb the ladders — and we’ll even take it all down and store it for you until next year.
And we’ll keep your lights maintained throughout the season. If a light goes out or there’s a problem, we’ll show up within 24 hours to fix it.
You get all of the dazzle, with no hassle.
We typically price our lighting installations on site, so you’ll know the price right away.
Outback Landscape is located in Idaho Falls, Idaho, and we serve residential and commercial properties in Idaho Falls, Rexburg and Pocatello — along with Bonneville, Madison and Bannock counties and Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Call us at 208-656-3220, or contact us online to schedule a free holiday lighting consultation! We’d love to hear from you.