I'm Nick Hiatt, and I own Saint Nick's Christmas Lights. Before I ever hung a single strand professionally, I spent 25 years on ladders around the Northwest washing windows, cleaning gutters, and doing the jobs most people would rather not do themselves. That's where this company actually started. Customers I'd known for years began asking if I'd put up their store-bought Christmas lights while I was up there anyway. Some didn't trust their balance on a ladder anymore. Some had rooflines so steep their families flat-out banned them from trying.

So every December, I hung lights. And one brisk winter morning, my crew and I showed up to re-hang a display we'd put up the year before. We spent way too long untangling a ball of strands, plugged everything in, and watched half the bulbs stay dark. Store-bought lights that had survived exactly one season in an attic.

Standing in that driveway, I decided that if I was going to do this during the holidays, I was going to do it the right way or not at all.

That meant commercial-grade everything. C9 bulbs on heavy socket wire, custom cut to the roofline, clipped and never stapled, with the wiring hidden and no loose strands doing double duty as extension cords. It costs more than a box-store strand, and it should. It survives a Portland winter, and the one after that. After enough Decembers in this rain, you learn exactly what fails first, and it's always the cheap stuff.

A few things I believe after all these years on roofs. Nobody should be on a steep, wet roof in December to save a few hundred dollars. I've seen too many close calls. A display should fit the house it's on, not fight it. The best compliment we get is that the lights look like they were designed for the home, because they were. And if a company hangs your lights but won't come back mid-season when a section goes dark, they hung product, not a service. Maintenance and takedown are part of the job, not extras.

I write the guides on this site myself, covering what professional installation really costs in Portland, how the pros actually do it, whether permanent lighting is worth it for your home, and the DIY mistakes I see every single year. No fluff, just what I'd tell you standing in your driveway.

I'm a University of Idaho graduate, based in the Portland area, and from October through January you'll find me exactly where you'd expect: on a roof somewhere between Vancouver and Estacada.