Brightening the Holidays: How Businesses Are Spreading Christmas Joy with Lights. LIMA — When Diane Schoonover first moved into the Indianbrook subdivision in Shawnee Township, she couldn’t help but notice the perfectly hung Christmas lights.
“When we moved to our house four years ago, that first year we saw how festive the neighborhood was,” she said. “We knew we just had to keep up.”
She soon learned many of her neighbors’ little secret: They hired Light Up Lima to install lights along their rooflines and the frames of their homes. Before long, she was dialing owner Zach Everett, now in his fifth year of installing the brilliant bulbs.
He has to start at that tip of the roof and go down. If it’s not quite right, he has to take it off and do it again so he can get the right bulb at the tippy top of each corner of the house,” Schoonover said. “It’s really impressive. It takes more time and effort, but you can see he cares about what he does.
With Thanksgiving now behind them and the Christmas season fully in swing, more people can enjoy the handiwork of Light Up Lima and other local companies to install industrial-grade holiday lights.
Finding a business
Everett is originally from Texas, where he had friends installing Christmas lights. When he moved near Bluffton five years ago to be closer to his wife’s family, he saw an opportunity.
“When we came up here, no one was doing it,” said Everett, whose company installed the tree near the Shawnee roundabout and at the Orthopaedic Institute of Ohio. “We put out some Facebook stuff that first year to see if anyone’s interested. We had 25 clients that first year, and now we’re at 150 and continuing to grow.”
The market caught on, as Everett said there were 10 area companies attending the event this year. Many began installations at the end of September, so their lights were ready to be turned on around Thanksgiving.
Cutting Edge Lawn Solutions owner Nick Daroma installed industrial-grade lights this year for the first time to ensure his mowing and landscaping business workers had plenty to do, especially to stay away from leaf cleanup jobs.
“It’s just fun,” said Daroma, who recently completed the lights installation at La Charreada restaurant in Shawnee Township. “Usually we’re mowing, doing landscaping or more serious stuff. It kind of gets us in the spirit. It just makes people happy when they see the lights.”
Brett Eikenbary founded Eikenbary Landscape Co. outside of Bluffton in 2021. He jumped into the fray this year. With less snow and ice removal in the wintertime recently, he decided to complement his landscape services by climbing on ladders so clients don’t have to.
“Once the product is done and they see what it looks like, it really changes minds on whether it’s worth it or not,” Eikenbary said. “I’ve had really positive feedback from people we’ve installed lights for. They’ll say how happy they are they haven’t gotten on the roof or that their husband’s not up on the ladder.”
Expensive proposition
There could be a few surprises when people get their free estimate to hang their lights, Everett said.
“We have to educate customers about the services they can have,” said Light Up Lima’s founder. “The other side is price. If you are not used to paying for service, you do not know that we are not using what they buy at Menards that dies after a year. They come with warranty and cost more in general.”
Each of the local businesses interviewed estimated that starting a typical two-story home in the first year would be $700 to $1,500, depending on how long the lights were and the heights of the peak rooflines. Maintenance, following years, is priced lower because the lights already have been purchased and are cut to proper lengths.
They also look at lights as an ongoing service rather than one-time installation. Instead of merely cutting lights for a customer’s home needs, they go to exchange burnt bulbs and retrieve their lights following the holidays. In between seasons, the companies hold their customers’ lights at their stores.
Once we explain to them the liability of getting on your roof, the liability that comes with having a business, they understand,” said Jacob Kunkleman of Jacob’s Window Cleaning & Pressure Washing, an Ada-based business that installed about a dozen locations this year. “You’re getting professional work done correctly. Something could break a couple days later if you don’t know what you’re doing.
Schoonover hasn’t regretted her investment in lights. Instead of seasonal lights, she bought a system she can change the colors through an app on her phone. That means orange and reds for Thanksgiving and then red and greens for Christmas. She will flip to soft white between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, with chasing rainbow lights for New Year’s.
“We did do the math and realized that we just felt like we got much better bang for our buck with this 20-year lighting,” she said. “We can celebrate all the holidays, rather than just Christmas.”
Brightening the season
Lights installers get the added benefit of bringing some joy to the season.
We just did a client’s house,” Daroma said. “When his kids came out and saw it, they freaked out, they were so happy about it. That’s why you do it.”
It’s made Eikenbary step up his lighting game at home, he said. Now he’s doing more than throwing some lights from Lowe’s onto a shrub and putting a tree up inside. He enjoys driving by past projects, too.
“I was going to take some pictures of a house at night, and when I came around the corner, it was like, ‘Wow, that really looks good,'” Eikenbary said. “Then you see the next house, and the next house, and it’s really something. It looks really nice. It’s a great feeling.”
Kunkleman said he had “grown to appreciate” the bigger light displays as the season went along.
Everett speaks poetically as he reflects over the influence of Light Up Lima; it is now a full time job for him, although planning for next year would start in February.
“Not too many jobs give instant gratification for a job well done,” he said. “With what we do, people can recognize when we do a good job. Every time someone sees it, it brings them a little bit of a smile during the darkest part of the year.”
