Priced the way Seasonal Lighting & Decor work is billed
A roofline lights install and a halloween & fall decor don't get quoted the same way, so why would every trade? SideWRK prices Seasonal Lighting & Decor the way the work is really billed: per linear foot of roofline — about $6 a foot — with tree wraps, wreaths, and takedown billed per item or flat. Tap the work, put in the numbers, and the line prices itself — no napkin math, no undercharging a job because you rushed the quote.
What Seasonal Lighting & Decor jobs actually run
These are the starting numbers SideWRK loads for common Seasonal Lighting & Decor work — researched to be realistic, so you can send an estimate that isn't a guess. Adjust any of them to your market in a tap.
Typical starting prices in the app — your area, your materials, and your reputation move them. You set your own; these just keep you from undercharging on the first quote.
Roofline lights install, priced out
Numbers only mean something on a real job, so here's how SideWRK builds the ticket on a common one:
SideWRK puts the parts on at what you actually paid — so the $468 of labor is what you clear, not a marked-up parts total dressed up as profit.
What moves a Seasonal Lighting & Decor price
Two Seasonal Lighting & Decor jobs that look the same on paper can be a hundred dollars apart once you're on site. Here's what actually changes the number — the things to size up before you quote:
- Roofline height and peaks — a tall, steep roof with a lot of peaks is slow, careful ladder work.
- Custom vs supplied — providing commercial-grade bulbs is a different number than hanging their box-store strings.
- Takedown and storage — the January takedown is real labor, so price the whole season, not just the hang.
What a Seasonal Lighting & Decor job puts on the record
Every trade documents something different, and Seasonal Lighting & Decor is no exception. SideWRK captures the number of stories and the rest of what your work needs on the record — the details that protect you and make the invoice stand up:
- the number of stories
- whose lights — leased for the season or the customer's own
- power at the eave, the GFCI outlet, and whether a timer is needed
- a plug-in-only electrical limit
Example note on a job: "Clips only, no staples in fascia — nearest GFCI is the garage outlet; timer set for dusk."
How to price a Seasonal Lighting & Decor job in SideWRK
- 1
Start the job and add your work
Open a Seasonal Lighting & Decor job and tap a suggestion like "Roofline lights install" or "Tree & bush wrap" — the common work is already loaded, so you tap instead of type.
- 2
Price it per linear foot of roofline
Enter the numbers and the line prices itself, per linear foot of roofline — about $6 a foot — with tree wraps, wreaths, and takedown billed per item or flat. Put parts on at your cost so what you clear is real profit, not just the Seasonal Lighting & Decor ticket total.
- 3
Note the details
Add a plain-English note — for example, "Clips only, no staples in fascia — nearest GFCI is the garage outlet; timer set for dusk." — and a photo of the work.
- 4
Log what the job needs
Capture the Seasonal Lighting & Decor-specific records: the number of stories, and whose lights — leased for the season or the customer's own.
- 5
Send it and get paid
Send the Seasonal Lighting & Decor estimate for approval. Your customer approves from their phone, the invoice goes out, and you get paid — card or Apple Pay, on the spot.
Staying on the right side of the rules
SideWRK documents your Seasonal Lighting & Decor work — it doesn't make you licensed, and it says so plainly. What to know: a business license in some places — and this trade is plug-in installs into existing GFCI outlets only; hardwired connections and new outlets are licensed electrical work. The app flags the permit and license triggers so they never surprise you mid-job.
Seasonal Lighting & Decor pricing — common questions
How do I price a Seasonal Lighting & Decor job in SideWRK?
You bill per linear foot of roofline — about $6 a foot — with tree wraps, wreaths, and takedown billed per item or flat. Add the work — Roofline lights install, Tree & bush wrap, Wreaths & garland — enter the numbers, and each line prices itself. Parts go on at your cost, so you see real profit and not just the total.
What does a typical Seasonal Lighting & Decor job cost?
It depends on the work, but as a realistic starting point a common job like roofline lights install runs about $850 in the app — roughly $468 of that is your labor and about $382 is parts at your cost. Common Seasonal Lighting & Decor work ranges from about $200 to $850. Those are defaults you can change — you always set your own prices.
What does SideWRK document on a Seasonal Lighting & Decor job?
The records Seasonal Lighting & Decor work actually needs: the number of stories; whose lights — leased for the season or the customer's own; power at the eave, the GFCI outlet, and whether a timer is needed. They stay on the job as you work, so the paper trail is built instead of reconstructed later, and the disclosures this trade needs print on the estimate and invoice themselves.
Do I need a license to do Seasonal Lighting & Decor work?
That depends on your state and the job, but here's the shape of it: a business license in some places — and this trade is plug-in installs into existing GFCI outlets only; hardwired connections and new outlets are licensed electrical work. SideWRK documents the work; it doesn't certify you. It flags the permit and license triggers so nothing sneaks up on you.
Does SideWRK work for trades other than Seasonal Lighting & Decor?
Yes — it runs all 42 trades, each priced and documented its own way. If you run more than one, the Multi-Trade plan unlocks them all and switches between them in a tap.
Your first jobs
Nobody hangs lights in August, and that is the whole trick of this trade. The install window is short and it does not move — the roofline work stacks up from mid-November to the week before Christmas, then the takedown push runs through January. Five months of season, and the part of it that pays is about six weeks long. So the number of houses you light this year is mostly decided by the number of driveways you stood in before Halloween. Right now, quoting is the work.
Which makes the first measurement the most valuable thing you carry away from a first job. Get the roofline right once and you are still quoting off that number in five years. Get it wrong on a napkin and you re-measure every November, in the cold, on a ladder. A Seasonal Lighting & Decor job in SideWRK hangs on a job site rather than a customer, and the site holds what the house is:
- a site label and the service address — the app's own example is "Whitfield — roofline + 2 trees", which is the whole job in six words
- stories: one, two, or three and up
- whose lights — yours, leased for the season; the customer's own; or mixed
- power at the eave: a GFCI outlet up there, only a ground-level outlet, or it needs a timer
- a notes box that asks, in as many words, for the roofline feet, the peaks, the trees to wrap, the timer, and where the lights store in January
Only the site label and address print on the customer's copy. Stories, whose lights, and the power situation stay on your side of the job — they are there for the quote and for next year, not for the homeowner to read.
You do not have to be at the house to get the footage. This trade's estimate opens straight into the takeoff calculator with the satellite built into it: trace the eaves on the aerial, the linear feet drop into the footage box, and the sheet prices the run at your own rate before handing the finished lines back to the estimate. In August, when nobody is buying yet and you have a Saturday, that is the difference between walking one house and quoting six from the kitchen table.
Then the estimate closes the part a napkin never could. What lands on the homeowner's phone is a page under your business name: the priced lines, and your photos of the house loading beside them. Underneath, a name box and a line of plain English saying that a typed name is an electronic signature on this approval. They type it, they tap Approve, and the invoice afterwards carries all three of the things an argument turns on — what the figure was, who agreed to it, and when. Deposits ride the same moment: set one on the estimate at waived, 10, 25, 33 or 50 percent, and the ask shows up the instant they say yes, payable by card or Apple Pay. In a trade where a house's worth of C9 strands gets bought weeks before a single clip goes on a shingle, that timing is the whole cash-flow question.
Two things then happen with you nowhere near your phone. When the estimate gets opened you find out — a notification if you have those turned on, an email if you don't; it picks one and won't double up on you. And silence gets answered for you: a brief note goes out on day three, one more on day seven, and after that the app stops asking. Estimates also go stale at fourteen days, which in September is doing you a favour. A quote nobody replied to in early August has no business still holding a prime week in December.
Filling the calendar in the first place is its own trade, and there is a whole guide for it. Book Your Holiday Lighting Season Before Fall Hits puts numbers on what a whole season can gross across the install days you actually get, argues out whose product should be going on the roof, and says exactly what last year's customers should be hearing from you before Labor Day. Worth reading before you spend a dollar getting found.
Repeat business — the operating year
Most trades sell a job. You sell a year. One house is three separate visits — the November hang, the January takedown, the re-install the following season — and the second and third ones are already sold the day the first one is approved. That is the shape of the money here, and it falls apart in exactly one place: nobody writes down what the house was.
- "Do this again." One tap on a finished job writes a brand-new estimate against the same homeowner and the same house, carrying every line at the figure you actually charged. That is your January takedown built out of the November install, and next November's re-install built out of this one — no notebook, no re-measuring. Only the work travels. Photos and payments stay behind with the original, and anything you credited off is dropped rather than dragged forward into a quote where it makes no sense.
- The bin decides who gets the call. The job site asks whose lights these are — yours leased for the season, the customer's own, or mixed — and the notes prompt asks where they store in January. Answer both and the question of who is hanging this house next year answers itself: whoever's garage the labeled bin sat in all summer. An installer who hands the strands back in a box in January has to sell that customer again from nothing. You just have to turn up.
- The lines you write twice become chips. Save a line out of the work form and it comes back as a one-tap favorite the next time you add work. Roofline install, tree and bush wrap, wreaths and garland, takedown — four saved lines and most of your quoting is tapping.
- The review ask is capped on purpose. Once a job is wrapped — marked done or paid — the app emails the customer for a review, then one reminder about three days behind it. That is the entire sequence — one ask, one nudge, then it stops for good. Every operator in this trade is invisible for ten months of the year; a page of December reviews is what carries you to the next August.
Turning that into a booked calendar before the weather turns is the other half, and it belongs to the guide linked above. This half is just making sure the record survives the summer.
How seasonal lighting bills
This trade does not bill one way. It bills four ways on one invoice, which is why a flat per-house number either robs you on a two-story colonial or prices you out of a ranch. The roofline runs by the linear foot. Trees and bushes go by the item. Wreaths and garland go by the piece. Halloween decor and the January takedown are flat. Here is the same price list from the top of this page with the quantities the app assumes underneath it, so you can see what each number is really made of:
| Work | What the price assumes | Per unit | The line |
|---|---|---|---|
| Roofline lights install | 140 linear feet of eave | $6.00 / ft | $840 |
| Tree & bush wrap | 4 items | $50 each | $200 |
| Wreaths & garland | 5 pieces | $50 each | $250 |
| Halloween & fall decor install | one yard, flat | — | $400 |
| Takedown & storage | one visit, flat | — | $250 |
| Re-install next season | 100 linear feet | $6.00 / ft | $600 |
The summary list further up shows the roofline at $850. That is the same 140 feet rounded off into a menu number; written the way the app actually writes the line, at six dollars a foot, it lands on $840. Every figure here is a starting default you can type over while the line is open.
The drivers up the page name what moves the price on a real house. Two of them are switches, not judgment calls. In the pricing sheet a two-story or steep roof multiplies the roofline by 1.4 — taller ladder, more peaks, slower moves — so that $840 run becomes $1,176 on the colonial next door with the identical footage. And hanging the customer's own strands multiplies it by 0.7, because you are selling labor only and warranting none of their product. There is a floor under all of it too: price a job under $300 in the sheet and it applies a $300 job minimum and says so, because below that a roll-out stops paying for itself. In the app the floor is yours to set — put a minimum charge for this trade in Shop and a job that comes in under it gets flagged, with one tap to add a Shop minimum line and bring it up.
Now put it on a house. Take the app's own example site — Whitfield, roofline plus two trees — as a single-story with 140 feet of eave, two bushes out front and three wreaths on the columns, hung in November and pulled in January:
One number, one document, one approval — quoted off a tape measure or an aerial trace, not off a feeling about how big the house looked.
The important line in that ticket is the last one, and it is the line most operators give away. Takedown is real labor on a cold January morning, and folding it into the install price to seem generous costs you a whole visit's money and the reason to keep the bins. Billed as its own line, it does two jobs at once: it pays for the January work, and it puts the customer's lights in your storage, which is what makes next November a phone call instead of a sales pitch.
Year one you are buying a house, not just lighting it. The app's split for this trade assumes about 55 percent of a ticket is your labor and about 45 percent is product, so on that $840 roofline line roughly $462 is your time and roughly $378 is C9s, socket wire, plugs, clips and a timer. Year two the strands are already cut to this roof and sitting in the bin with the address on it. Same $6 a foot, same $840, and almost none of that $378 to spend again — plus the $250 takedown behind it. That is the arithmetic. The strategy underneath it, and the harder question of whose product should be going up there in the first place, is argued out properly in the guide linked further up.
Multiplying jobs
Everything expensive about this trade happens once: the drive, the ladder set-up, the survey of the house. Whatever else gets sold while you are already standing there is nearly free money, and the season is short enough that there is no second trip to fall back on.
- Let them add the trees themselves. Mark a line optional and it turns into a checkbox on the approval page, with the running total rising and falling as the homeowner ticks. Quote the roofline as the job; hang the bushes, the wreaths and the garland off it as choices. Nobody is being closed at their own front door — they are sitting at a table deciding, and that is usually where the sensible extra gets a yes.
- Bring up Halloween while you are measuring for Christmas. Fall decor stands on its own as a $400 flat line in the app's starting numbers, and September — when you are already ringing to lock the December date — is when it costs you nothing to mention. You are getting the ladder out regardless. It is the second trip that eats a season, never the second sale.
- Truck stock already knows a lighting rig's shopping list. Switch it on and the shelf comes pre-loaded for this trade: C9 bulbs, SPT-1 socket wire, vampire plugs male and female, shingle and gutter clips, zip ties, outdoor timers. Give each one the count you want warning at. Bill an item out of stock while writing a line and the tally drops when the work saves, and if that was the last one it tells you right there rather than at seven in the morning two towns away. Come back into the app on a low shelf and a banner is waiting. A scanner handles both ends — point it at a box to pull the item up, or to drop it straight onto a line. There is more on all of it under truck stock.
- The balance does its own chasing. Wrap a job with money still outstanding and the customer hears about it on day three, day seven and day fourteen. Three notes, then quiet. Every one of them carries a link that pays by card or Apple Pay. The payment request you write yourself is a separate thing altogether — that one settles into an app the customer already has, direct to you, and as you save each handle SideWRK spells out what that particular rail says about taking money for work. They do not say the same thing, and finding that out in the middle of December is not the time. Need card money before the supply run? Push it to your debit card in roughly half an hour; Stripe's cut for the hurry is 1%.
- Photograph the house at dusk. The bare eave in daylight, the same eave lit at six — pair them in the work gallery on your public page and they sit side by side as before and after. No other trade produces proof this good on its own. A homeowner choosing between two installers is choosing between two streets they can look at.
The live seasonal lighting demo boots a whole seeded outfit — jobs mid-flight, paperwork already written, nothing to sign up for. The reminder and review emails are sent from the server, so those you only meet on paying work.
Price it now
Same sheet that opens inside a job, running here for free. Put in the roofline footage, your own rate per foot, the stories and whose lights they are, and it prices the run — including the multipliers above and your hard costs, so what comes out the bottom is profit and not just a ticket total. If you don't know the footage, it will send you to trace the eaves off the satellite first.
The paper worth keeping
Under the totals of everything this trade sends sits a short block of notices you never had to write. They aren't aimed at frightening a homeowner. They are there because both of the arguments this work can produce — a fall, or an outlet somebody wanted added while you happened to be up a ladder — surface a long way downstream from the conversation in the driveway. Here is what each one is actually for:
- The height notice. In the operator's own words on the customer's own copy: height is your responsibility, ladder and fall-protection practice applies to every roofline, and a steep or tall roof carries extra risk that only you on the day can weigh. It also refuses to pretend to be more than it is — it states outright that it certifies nothing. What you get out of it is a dated line saying the risk was written down before the ladder ever came off the rack.
- The plug-in limit, which is the one that matters here. Hanging plug-in lighting and decor generally needs no more than a local business license. Run a new outlet, hardwire a connection, put in a permanent lighting circuit, and you are standing in licensed electrical work. The notice draws that line for you: this trade is plug-in installs into existing GFCI-protected outlets, nothing further, and the licensing behind it moves state to state and city to city. Nobody is telling you what to do with your own afternoon. But when a homeowner says "while you're up there, could you just put a plug in" — that sentence is already sitting on paper you both hold.
- Your licence number, if you carry one. Type it into the business licence box in Shop and it rides under your business name on everything the customer receives. The field is marked optional here, which is the honest label — a lot of plug-in work doesn't need one. Typing it costs you thirty seconds once.
- The nudge when a ticket gets big. Let a job reach a thousand dollars with no licence number saved and the job puts up a plain caution: that figure sits at or above where most states start requiring a contractor licence, and cutting one project into two estimates is not a way around it. A heads-up, nothing more. Nothing is blocked and nothing refuses to save.
- Next April, handled in October. Invoice numbers, the money that genuinely arrived, and the supply-house receipts you photographed all roll into a year-end wrap-up: line by line, grouped into categories, downloadable for a spreadsheet, plus a page you can print and put in front of whoever files for you. This trade spends in autumn and collects in December, which makes having both halves in one place worth more here than in most.
And the sentence the document itself finishes on, which we will repeat rather than soften: SideWRK is a documentation tool, not legal advice, and it does not determine or guarantee compliance with any licensing, safety or disposal requirement. The records are ours to keep. The rules stay yours to meet.