When to Book Christmas Light Installation in Central Wisconsin

If you are thinking about having your house lit this year, the honest answer is that you should be booking now, in September or October, not when you start seeing lights go up on your street. By then most of the season is already spoken for.

That sounds like the kind of thing every company says to create urgency. In this case there is an actual reason, and it has more to do with weather than with sales.

The install window is shorter than people think

Christmas light installation in central Wisconsin happens from the end of October into early November. Not December. There is a practical reason for that, and it is the roof.

Light clips grip the edge of a shingle or the lip of a gutter. They seat properly on a dry roof at moderate temperature. Once a roof is frozen, shingles get brittle, clips do not seat the same way, and anyone working up there is on a slick surface at height. Installers do not stop working in late November because the calendar says so. They stop because the roof stops cooperating.

So the entire season gets installed inside a window of roughly three to four weeks. Every house lit in central Wisconsin this December was on a schedule that filled up in October.

Why the schedule fills the way it does

A crew can only do so many houses in a day, and each one takes longer than it looks. A custom layout means measuring rooflines, sorting which runs need which bulb spacing, and cutting and building the strands to fit that house. A two story home with trees and wreaths is most of a day.

Multiply that by a three week window and the arithmetic is unforgiving. The houses lit first are the ones that called first. That is not a sales tactic, it is just how a fixed number of working days divides up.

What booking early actually gets you

• A design visit while there is still time to plan it. Someone walks the property, looks at the rooflines, the trees, how the house sits from the street, and designs for that specific house. Booked late, that conversation gets compressed.
• A choice of install date. Early bookings get picked first, which matters if you want the lights on for a particular weekend.
• Time to change your mind. Most people add something after seeing the design. Adding two trees in early October is easy. Adding them the week before Thanksgiving is not.

What to ask whoever you hire

Christmas lighting is one of those services where two quotes can look similar and mean completely different things. Four questions separate them.

• Who owns the lights? Some companies sell you the lights, some lease them. If you own them, storage, replacement and testing become your problem in July. If the company owns them, that is theirs.
• Is takedown included, or is it a second invoice? This is the most common surprise. Ask before you sign, not in January.
• What happens if a section goes dark in December? Bulbs fail and connections work loose in the cold. Ask whether a service call during the season is included or billed.
• Are the lights commercial grade? Retail strands are built for a season or two. Commercial bulbs and clips are built to be installed, removed and reinstalled year after year, which is why leasing companies use them.

How Wash Force does it

We lease. We own the lights, we design the layout for your property, we install them, we maintain them through the season, we take them down, and we store them until next year. You never buy a strand and you never find a box of half dead lights in the garage the following November.

It is one price for the season. Design, the lights, installation, takedown, storage and any service call in between are all included. If a run goes dark in December we come out and fix it, and that is not a separate charge.

We do rooflines, trees, wreaths, bushes and timers, for houses and for commercial buildings. Installation starts at $800 for the season, and most jobs run between $1,000 and $1,500 depending on how much roofline you want covered, how many stories, and how many trees and bushes go in.

One thing we will not promise

A takedown date.

Takedown starts in January. If the roof is frozen or snowed in, we wait for it to warm up, and some years that means February or March. We could put a date in writing and then send someone onto an iced roof to hit it, but that is how people get hurt and how shingles get damaged. Your lights stay maintained and insured the whole time they are up, and waiting costs you nothing extra.

We would rather tell you that up front than have it be a surprise in February.

The short version

Installation happens across about three weeks at the end of October and start of November, because that is when a roof will still take a clip safely. The schedule fills in the order people call. If you want your house lit this year, September and October is when to sort it out.

Wash Force installs Christmas lights across central Wisconsin, including Marshfield, Wausau, Stevens Point and Wisconsin Rapids. Get in touch for a free estimate and we will come out and design something for your property.