Carefully Hang your Christmas Lights – Top Tips

What’s the most enjoyable part of sprucing up your home for Christmas? We’d put in a strong shout for hanging up the festive lights. After all, there’s just so much exciting scope for creativity with those lights, though you should be careful to keep yourself safe as you attach them.

All the same, though, you don’t have to play things too safe and leave yourself with boring-looking illumination. Here are some tips for impressing neighbours and visitors without going overboard.

Mix it up

Much of the excitement of Christmas lights, whether we buy a whole new batch fresh from the local shop or fish existing lights out of the attic, comes in the many varieties of lighting.

However, lights can differ in not only their construction but also their safety implications. Incandescent lights, for instance, are a classic, warm-glowing choice, but get hot easily. Traditional LEDs are very bright, ceramic lights are opaque, and wide-angle LEDs discernibly throw light.

Outfit your Christmas tree

Yes, of course – your Christmas tree awaits being strewn with lights. However, you might not have realised how many different ways it’s possible to hang them.

Fortunately, Country Living details elaborate instructions for hanging them not only in the traditional horizontal fashion but also vertically, top to bottom and bottom to top. The site has a few tips to share on how you can achieve the best aesthetic effect with your chosen method.

Wrap it up to prevent blown fuses

You might want to decorate your home’s exteriors as well, but doing so would risk you blowing a fuse on one of the light strands. To check the fuse, look behind a small sliding door on the plug’s male end. A burnt-out plug should be replaced with a new plug of the same amperage.

Blown fuses typically result from moisture entering the connections, so wrap those up with electrical tape. If roofing damage is adding to the moisture, roofers in Chester-le-Street might be able to help.

Turn a corner… by lighting up a corner

You can do that even in a seemingly modest part of your home. If a particular corner currently looks akin to a dark abyss, consider following Ideal Home‘s advice about adding a basic lighting feature with fairy lights. This would let you simply but dramatically throw illumination into that crevice.

You can then complete the look by lining a nearby windowsill with some pretty tea lights capable of shimmering and shining to subtly impressive effect.

Sometimes, less is more

Some people try so hard with their festive illumination that you can actually stand out by opting for the minimalist look. Consider the example set by the Popular Mechanics site, which advises you to attach a real pine wreath to your front door and then light up that wreath with a bulb two feet away.

This approach, as the site amusingly explains, says: “I acknowledge that it’s Christmas, but I’m not getting on the roof for anything short of a DirecTV catastrophe.” Leave roofing work to the roofers!

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