Amador City Christmas Light Installation

You can walk the whole downtown in about five minutes, which is kind of the point of Amador City. It also means one dark storefront stands out. With holiday shoppers coming through in early December, shop owners along Main Street usually want their buildings lit a good week ahead, and that’s where our Amador City Christmas light installation comes in. We’re ten minutes up the road in Plymouth. Call (209) 444-1844 and you’ll get a number on that first call.

Most of what people see driving through is Main Street, which is also old Highway 49. The buildings are old stone, brick and wood, with covered sidewalks and porches out front. That’s a good thing for lighting. Porch posts take pillar wraps nicely, and the rooflines over those covered walks give us a clean straight line for a strand of warm white.

What we won’t do is drill into a building that’s been standing since the mining days. We hang from wood trim, rails and awning frames with clips and ties that pull off without a mark. And since a lot of these shops are small with one outlet out front, we plan the power so a single timer can run the whole storefront.

The Imperial Hotel block is the one everybody photographs, and the brick there reads beautifully with just a roofline and garland on the balcony rail. Less is more on a building that old. The shops on either side look best when they match it, so if a few owners on the block want to coordinate colors, we’re glad to light them the same week.

Off the highway, Amador City gets quiet fast. The houses up Keystone Alley sit near where the old Keystone Mine was, and some of those lots leave very little room to stage a ladder. On tight lots we work from the side yard and carry things in by hand instead of parking a truck on your flower bed.

Church Street heads up past the Imperial Hotel toward the cemetery, and the homes back that way have porches and old-style gables that light up well with a simple outline. Over on Water Street and the spots closer to Amador Creek, you’ll find big oaks and brush along the banks. A wrapped oak trunk by the creek is about as pretty as holiday lighting gets in this town, and it doesn’t take a lot of lights to pull off.

We handle roofline lights along the eaves and up the gables, wrap tree trunks and branches, wrap porch pillars and columns, and set stake lighting along walkways, clear of the sprinklers and drip line in all these little garden yards. We hang lit wreaths and run lit garland on railings, banisters and entries. The garland is especially good on shop railings, since folks see it right at eye level when they walk by.

We supply the lights. You don’t have to buy anything or dig old boxes out of the shed. If you’d like a better sense of how we do wreaths, the wreath hanging page walks through it.

Cold nights and the odd rainstorm can knock a section out. If one goes dark during the season, call (209) 444-1844 and we’ll drive over and swap the bad section.

In January we’re back to take everything down. Your gutters are clear before the wildflowers show up, and you don’t store a single light. We’re doing the same rounds in Drytown, Plymouth, Martell and Sutter Creek, so we’re through Amador City every week. Drytown is a handful of old buildings strung along 49, and a roofline and a wreath per building covers it. Martell is mostly shopping centers, so it’s storefront work, and Plymouth is home, where we light more houses than anywhere.

Tell us what you’ve got, a storefront, a cottage or both, and we’ll give you a price over the phone at (209) 444-1844. A photo of the front helps, and you can send it through the contact form.