A Few Tips for Putting Up Holiday Lights in Your Yard

The holiday season is well upon us. This is the time of year people start putting up all their holiday decorations. This article has a few tips that will hopefully help, and make your decorating experience a little less stressful!

The first thing you will be doing is getting everything out of course. Now depending on how you packed it up last year, this could be a project in itself! After years if just tossing things into plastic storage bins and boxes, last year I decided to be more organized. I actually bought these special made plastic pieces for wrapping the strands of lights around.

If you don't want to spend money though, you can easily wrap the lights nicely, using your arm! Bend at the elbow, and holding one end of the light strand between your forefinger and thumb, wrap the lights around your elbow, going in a circle, until you have them all wrapped up.

Then take the lights and plug the ends into each other, making sure to wrap a little piece of the strand around the entire part that you just wrapped into a circle. If you do this with each strand of lights, and then stack them neatly on top of each other, you will have an easier time the following year. You won't waste half a day untangling the lights!

The next thing you will want to do is to start plugging in each of your light strands, and decorations, one at a time, to make sure they work. Check anything else that you are planning on putting up at this time as well. If you have bulbs out, replace them at this time.

If you have lights that are not working, you can try changing the fuses, or making sure there aren't any broken or missing bulbs. You also want to inspect the condition of the wries at this time as well. If anything looks worn, you should just toss it out. Frayed wires can be very dangerous!

After you get everything sorted out, make sure you have enough outlets, and extension cords. I like to lay out my extension cords, and then figure out how many lights I will be able to put up. Remember that the manufacturer's directions on most lights say not to plug in more then three sets together.

You will have to keep that in mind as well. So, the safe thing is three sets of lights per outlet, or extension cord. You can purchase the extension cord extenders, which I like to do. These come in various lengths, and you plug them into your extension cord, or outlet, and they have three plugs on them. This gives you more outlets, for more lights!

After you have a plan, and know how much you will be able to plug in, you can start your decorating. If you live in an older house, as I do, be sure that your are not plugging too much in to one 'fuse', or you will be blowing fuses very often. I have half of my stuff plugged into one side of the house, and the other half plugged into the other side, using two different fuses. Before you start putting up your decor such as deers, and trees, make sure you have zip ties and stakes handy.

Most decorations come with stakes, but if any were lost or broken the year before, I find that the metal BBQ skewers work very well for securing things down! Also, a lot of the deer pieces will need to be zip tied in spots. Zip ties are also very handy for securing lights to chain link fences. I like to use them to secure my lights to the fence mainly because one year some of our decorations were stolen, and this will make it a little harder to remove the lights!

Remember that when you end up taking down your decor at the end of the holiday season, pack everything away nicely and neatly. This little bit of extra effort will make for much easier decorating the next year. Also keep in mind that a great way to get more lights and decorations, if you don't have a lot or want more, is to hit the stores after the holidays. Most stores mark their holiday items fifty to seventy-five percent off! After a couple years of this, your yard can look like those yards you stop to take a good look at during the holidays!