Christmas Lighting Installation in Akron, OH

Akron sits on the Glaciated Allegheny Plateau about 39 miles south of Lake Erie, at roughly 945 feet, and the local topography is described as rolling hills and varied terrain rather than flat ground. That shows up on a holiday job before any design question does.

Two houses on the same street can present completely differently: one drive runs level to a two story front elevation, the next climbs so that the gutter line starts well above the walk. Access, as much as design, can decide how long a December install takes.

The season here has blunt numbers behind it. At the Akron-Canton Airport station, January runs a mean temperature of 27.9 degrees, the station records 40 days in a typical year at or below freezing, and seasonal snowfall averages 47.2 inches. The spread matters more than the average.

Winter totals have run as high as 82.0 inches in 1977-78 and as low as 18.2 inches in 1949-50, and the snowiest single month on record was 37.5 inches in January 1978. A plan built around an average season is a plan that only works in an average season.

Akron's housing arrived in waves and the rooflines still record it. Goodyear Heights and Firestone Park were built during the rubber era to house workers and their families, and both are full of houses built from mail-order plans. Those are compact and repetitive, mostly simple gable roofs with short runs of fascia.

On a street of them a display lives or dies on whether the line is straight and the spacing is even, because the neighboring roof three doors down gives the eye an instant reference. Adding more light does very little on that kind of street. Getting the line right does almost everything.

West Hill is the opposite problem. The area around the Oakdale Historic District holds the stately older homes, and those elevations carry dormers, deep eaves, bay windows and roof planes meeting at awkward angles. Each of those is a point where a straight run has to stop and start again.

Lighting a facade like that well means choosing which lines to state and which to leave dark. Tracing every edge on a complicated house turns a good elevation into noise, and it takes far longer to hang and far longer to pull down.

Takedown is the part that gets planned least and costs most. With 40 days at or below freezing in an average year, and 3.3 days at or below zero, hardware fitted in mild November weather comes off frozen in January.

Anything clipped into a gutter full of ice is harder to remove than it was to fit, and it is the ice rather than the clip that does the damage to the gutter. That is the argument for fixing a removal date at the same time as the install date, instead of leaving it to be negotiated in the first week of January.