Holiday lighting, whether indoors or outdoors, is a beautiful way to add cheer and ambiance to any home.
But, now that the chaos of the holidays has come to a close, it is time to start thinking about removing your holiday lighting and storing everything for next year.
Just as there is a right way and a wrong way for installing holiday lighting, there is a right way and a wrong way for uninstalling it.
Here are some tips for removing and storing your holiday lighting properly:
- Hopefully, you installed your lighting on the outside of your home using gutter clips. These are nifty little accessories that slip onto the edge of your rain gutters and have a hook on the end for the light strand to lay on. In this case, simply climb a ladder and remove the lighting and clips the same way that you installed them. If you wrapped light strands around bushes or trees in your yard, make sure not to tug on them as you are unwrapping them. If the strand gets caught on something, be careful to locate the snag and unhook it.
- As you are uninstalling your lighting, slowly wrap each strand around a piece of cardboard or plastic. Make sure that you don’t overlap the light bulbs and only wrap the strand one layer deep. If you have a long strand, this might require a long piece of plastic or cardboard but, it is worth it to make sure that the strand is wrapped without any tangles or overlapping.
- Once you have all of your tubes with lights wrapped around them, it is time to put them away for the rest of the year. This step requires a plastic box with a lid that clicks closed. Your holiday lights are stored for up to eleven months out of the year, so they could be damaged by flooding and even rodents if stored in a cardboard box.
As you are planning your day to uninstall your holiday lighting, make sure to follow these tips for doing it safely and properly. You will need some items to wrap your lighting around, a plastic tub to store them in, and any other equipment like a ladder and gloves.