Exterior or Outdoor Christmas lights can be installed on all kinds of surfaces including brick, stucco and even wood shingles. You can hang your exterior Christmas lights from the roof, around a door or window or even dress up the favorite spruce tree in your front yard with some nice colorful flashing lights. The first thing you should do before installing your exterior lights is to make sure you have all the tools and equipment including lifts and ladders to make the job go nice and smooth. You usually will need nails, a hammer, Christmas Light Hanger Clips and a ladder if the spot that you are hanging them is high off the ground.
If you do not think you have the strength or skill set to hang the Christmas lights yourself you could always hire a local service to hang them for you. You also will want to plug in all of the light strings before installing them to make sure all of the bulbs work. If your string of outdoor lights are tangled you will want to untangle them before testing to see which bulbs are bad to make things easier. You can buy bulb testers and s-clips to hang and test the lights at the same place you bought the Christmas lights most of the time.
Best Way To Hang Outdoor Christmas Lights
The best way to hang outdoor Christmas lights is to make sure you hang them the right way. This means you do not want to take shortcuts because in the long run your lights could fall off the house or the trees you install them on and then you will have to re hang them again. There are many ways to hang outdoor / exterior Christmas lights and depending if you are going to hang them on brick, from a roof, over a window or even on a stucco will determine how you actually mount them on that surface.
How To Hang Christmas Lights In Trees
If you have bought a regular basic strand of Christmas lights you can mount them on trees by laying them on the branches. Once you have all of the lights on the branches you can secure them down with twist ties or small pieces of rope to make sure when a heavy storm comes through they won't just fall off. Mounting them with twist ties or small pieces of rope can prevent the Christmas lights from falling off of the tree during a cold windy day.
How To Hang Icicle Christmas Lights
Icicle Christmas Lights are easy to mount just like regular exterior Christmas lights. You can buy s-clips that will attach to both the Icicle Christmas Lights wiring harness and then also the gutter, roof or nail that you are hanging the lights from. You will always want to untangle the Icicle Lights before you hang them on the house or tree. The best way to install Icicle Christmas Lights is to first lay them all out from end to end on the lawn or inside if you have a large enough space. Then you will want to coil them up into a 20" or so round coil, so when you go to hang them up on the s-clips or your nails you can simply just unroll the lights and they will install quickly. Once you have them coiled up you can then hang the s-clips on the gutter and then hang the lights onto the s-clips. If you are hanging the Icicle lights around a window you can hang them on the nails you have hammered into the four corners.
How To Hang Christmas From The Lights Roof
If you are going to hang the Christmas lights from the roof you can either hang them from the gutters if you have them or you could hang the lights directly from the roof if you do not have gutters. If you wanted to hang the lights from the roof and you do not have gutters on your home, you could then nail small nails into the face place of the soffit or on the edge of the roof line.
Hanging Christmas Lights From Brick
If you want to hang Christmas Lights from brick is to nail a cement nail into the brick. Once you have nailed the cement nail into the brick you then can either hook an s-clip to the nail or you could hang the Christmas lights onto the nail directly. If you have a ceiling above the brick you could hang the Christmas lights from a hook to prevent you from nailing into the brick which is what some people prefer to do.
Hanging Christmas Lights From Stucco
If you want to hang your Christmas lights from the stucco on your house you can either nail a small stone or cement nail into the stucco surface or you could hang the lights from an area above the surface you wanted to attach the lights to. You could use double sided tape to hang the Christmas lights but if you live in an area where it rains a lot the double sided tape my not last to long and then the lights may become detached from the stucco.