I don't like ladders above about twelve feet, which on most houses would rule out Christmas lights. On a Cape, it turns out, it mostly just rules out the roof. Our main roof is steep enough that I've never set foot on it and don't plan to. But the front eaves are low, the gutter runs right along them, and almost everything we wanted to light was within reach of a pole.
Last year we hung a wreath and called it done. This year Tessa wanted the whole front lit, "like people who live here," and I wanted to do it without the extension ladder. Both of us got what we wanted.
What we bought
- Two 25-foot strands of warm white C9 LED bulbs: $38
- A 100-pack of all-in-one clips that grip a gutter lip or slide under a shingle: $14
- A telescoping light pole with a hook head made for putting clips on gutters: $27
That's $79, and the receipt went into the kitchen junk drawer to wait for its 11 percent Menards rebate. We already had an outdoor timer and an extension cord rated for outside.
How it went
We did it the Saturday after Thanksgiving, around 40 degrees and gray. The method: lay the strand out on the lawn, snap a clip onto the wire every foot or so, then use the pole to lift each clip up and hook it onto the gutter lip from the ground. The first ten clips took me twenty minutes and a lot of muttering. It's a bit like trying to put a key in a lock from twelve feet away. By the twentieth clip I had the angle figured out, and the rest of the front eave went up in about half an hour.
The corners near the front stoop were too awkward for the pole, so I did those from the 6-foot fiberglass stepladder, standing two rungs below the top. That's my comfort zone, and I stayed in it.
My mistake was starting at the wrong end. I clipped from the left corner because that's where I happened to be standing, and when I got to the right side, the plug end was at the corner farthest from the outlet by the front steps. The choice was taking half the strand down and starting over, or running an extension cord along the foundation. I took it down. It cost me twenty minutes, and the cord running across the yard would have bothered me every time I pulled into the driveway.
Tessa handled everything at ground level and above my comfort zone. She hung the wreath, wrapped a lighted garland around the stoop railing we'd scraped and painted before the wedding, and at one point offered to take the extension ladder up to outline the two dormers. "I could do the dormers," she said. "Nobody is doing the dormers," I said. The dormers are dark this year, and I'm at peace with that.
Running costs and the timer
The lights are on a timer from 5 to 11 p.m. LED C9s use very little power. By my math, fifty bulbs for six hours a night all December comes to well under a couple of dollars on our electric bill, which is a nice change from the incandescent strands my parents had when I was a kid. My dad used to say the lights were the reason January's bill made him sit down.
Gary came out to look while we were finishing. He's had the same set of incandescent C9s since the 1980s, multicolored, and he puts them up every year on the day after Thanksgiving whether it's sunny or sleeting. He studied our warm white LEDs for a while and said they looked "a little modern," which from Gary is not quite a compliment and not quite an insult.
Taking them down in January should be easier, since the clips stay on the strand and come off the gutter with the same pole. I've already marked the plug end with a piece of tape so next year I start at the right corner.
Maximum height reached by me for the lights this year: six feet of stepladder, two rungs from the top.
