Fiddletown Christmas Light Installation

Around Fiddletown, the nearest neighbor is often across a pasture, and the first thing anybody sees of your place at night is whatever’s lit at the end of the driveway. So Fiddletown Christmas light installation, for us, means picking the handful of things that show up from the road and from the porch, and doing those well. We run out Fiddletown Road from our Plymouth shop all season, so call (209) 444-1844 and we’ll sketch out the layout together while you’re on the line.

The drive out is half the fun. Head east off 49 with the Shenandoah Valley vineyards off to the north, and keep going till the road narrows and the old buildings show up. The little historic stretch along Fiddletown Road, with the Chew Kee Store and the rest of those Gold Rush buildings, is one of the prettiest spots in the county on a cold December evening.

The homes in town, over on Jibboom Street and the lanes around it, are mostly older, on smaller lots, with porches and pitched roofs. They’re simple to light and they look right in warm white. We clip strands to gutters and slide clips under shingle edges. No nails and no staples, because a lot of that trim is old wood that splits if you look at it wrong.

Most of our Fiddletown calls come from the ranch properties, though. Tyler Road has everything from a few acres to real ranch land. American Flat Road is mostly bigger parcels with the house set well back. Ostrom Road runs past vineyard ground. Three miles north, River Pines sits down along the Cosumnes under tall pines, where the houses are closer together and the trunks are too tall to wrap past the first limbs. On property like that, a few things come up every time.

Power. The outlet is usually on the house, and the gate might be a long way off. We’ll tell you what’s practical to light off the power you’ve got, and where it isn’t, we’ll put the effort into the house and yard instead of running cord through a pasture.

The driveway. Stake lights along a gravel drive look great, but only if they stay put. We set them firm, keep them clear of any drip lines or sprinkler heads, and space them so your truck doesn’t clip them on the way out.

Trees. Blue oaks and valley oaks wrap well, trunk and lower branches, and one lit oak near the house can carry the whole yard. Big pines are tougher. We light what we can reach safely and leave the rest.

Ranch house rooflines. Long, low, single-story roofs are about the easiest thing we light. A continuous outline along the eaves with a wreath centered on the gable end reads clean from a long ways off.

If the yard is the main event, take a peek at our stake lighting page for more on how we lay out walkways and drives.

• Roofline strands along the eaves and gutters, up the peaks, around the gables
• Oak wraps, trunk first, then out along the sturdy lower limbs
• Pillar wraps, spiraled tight up the porch posts
• Stake lights lining the walk, the drive, or the edge of the lawn
• Lit wreaths for the front door, the ranch gate, or a gable end
• Lit garland draped on porch railings, banisters, and arches

We bring every light and every clip. You’re not buying boxes at the hardware store, and you’re not on a ladder in the cold. Hook it all to a timer and the yard lights itself each evening, then goes dark whenever you tell us.

Fiddletown sits at about 1,700 feet, and December nights out here can get plenty cold. Frost on the lawn in the morning is normal. Our lights handle it, but if a strand does quit on you, call (209) 444-1844 and we’ll head out Fiddletown Road to fix it.

Once the new year settles in, our crew heads back out in January and pulls everything down. Nothing stays up on the roof through the spring rains, and you don’t have to find room in the barn for storage bins. We make the same trip for folks over in Somerset, and back through Plymouth and Drytown on 49, so the drive is no trouble.

Estimates are free. Tell us the size of the house and what you’d like lit, and we can usually give you a number on the spot. Call (209) 444-1844. If you know roughly how far the gate is from your nearest outlet, even better, and photos can go through our contact page.