Christmas Light Installation For Ankeny, Iowa Homes

The one line in it that changes the whole job

Read the European Romantic pages and you find this: gable ends "generally have no eaves/overhang," except where the house is half-timbered. The same style lists "Shallow overhangs" as one of its essential elements.

That matters more than the pitch numbers do. On a normal house we clip to the lip of the gutter or to the edge of a shingle tab. Nothing goes in with a nail or a screw. On a gable end with no overhang there is no gutter lip and no shingle edge sticking out. There is nothing for a clip to grab.

So on those houses we look at that face first, before we talk about anything else. Sometimes the answer is to light a different line that reads just as well from the street. Sometimes it is a different attachment for that one run. Either way you hear it from us before we start, not after.

The gambrel is the other one worth naming. A side gambrel Colonial Revival can run 20 to 36 in 12 at the eave. At 36 in 12 the lower roof is steeper than a set of stairs. It is a slow, careful run and we plan for that when we quote it.

Materials matter here too. The pattern book lists flat clay tile, cedar shakes, slate, synthetic slate and heavy-profile fiberglass shingles. A clip shaped for a flat asphalt tab does not sit the same way on a clay tile or a cedar shake. That changes what we carry up and how long the run takes, and it is a fair question to ask any installer who quotes you.

One more Prairie Trail rule shows up in the finished look. After the first six houses on a street, a front can only repeat if three of five things change: color, window type, porch type, building material or trim. Your neighbors are deliberately not the same shape as you. A set cut for the house next door will not fit yours, which is the whole reason we cut every run to the house it goes on.

That last number catches people out. Ankeny is the newest big town on our list, so people assume it is wall to wall big detached houses. It is not. Older towns out here are more detached than Ankeny is, not less. Growing fast meant building townhomes and apartments at the same time as houses.

If you are in a townhome row, the part that gets lit is usually just your own front and your own peak. Say that when you send the address and the ballpark comes back right the first time.

The 1960s and 1970s pocket is a different kind of job again. Every house there gets read off the satellite image on its own, same as everywhere else. If you live in that part of town, your number is going to look nothing like a Prairie Trail number, and that is the honest reason we do not publish one price.