Buffalo, N.Y. (WBEN) - With Christmas just around the corner, Western New Yorkers are getting ready to put up their holiday lights and decorations both inside and outside their homes. This year, more and more people are considering hiring professionals to put up their lights, take them down and even store them.
These professionals are oftentimes your window cleaning and pressure washing businesses in Western New York, who make the transition in the wintertime to Christmas light installation.
"The traditional way of hanging lights, the Clark Griswold way, it's a hassle," says David Kaing, Operations Manager of The Bubbly Sponge, a Western New York-based window cleaning and pressure washing servicer who have been installing holiday lights both commercially and residentially for nearly 10 years.
"Our clientele is is not only older folks who don't want to do it anymore, but we've got a lot of families who have young families who have had a bad experience growing up hanging Christmas lights. With the true professional lights that we use, they're modular, and we custom fit them to the home. So there's no longer any [of the] typical challenges you'd have in hanging the old-style Christmas lights."
"It's convenience," notes Luke Abbott, owner of All Clean Power Wash. "Safety is probably the biggest factor too because you're on roofs, some of these houses are two and a half three storeys up, steep pitches, a lot of ladder work. We use the right equipment to make sure our guys are safe."
These businesses will typically lease their lights to you, so you don't have to spend money to buy lights and store. Most light installation businesses include tear down, maintenance and storage costs in their price.
"We don't just do lights, we also do some interior entryways, around the door, it really depends on what the customer wants. They don't have to touch it at all, and it's a true hassle-free service. The middle of January, we start taking these lights down. We take them back to our warehouse, we disassemble them we dry them out and we put them in bins and put them on a pallet rack and we store that there until September when they get prepped to go back up in [late] October," says Kaing.
"It's an all-inclusive package, so you never have to worry about it," says Abbott. "We wrap tree trunks, bush canopies, we do wreaths, garland and all the roofline lighting."
Kaing says you can definitely tell the difference when the businesses install the light compared to the average Joe. Abbott says his team attends training events to ensure that the are installing lights the safe way.
"Lancaster, Williamsville, Amherst, Pendleton, Lockport, Chautauqua County, Orchard Park, West Seneca, Hamburg, those are probably our strongest neighborhoods for lights," noted Kaing.