Christmas Light Installation in Bremen, GA

Bremen is not just Carrollton further west

First thing worth saying: Bremen is in Haralson County, not Carroll. That trips people up when they go looking for services, because a lot of outfits that say they cover "Carroll County" quietly stop at the county line, and Bremen is over it.

The town grew up around manufacturing rather than around a courthouse square or a college. Bremen was an apparel and textile town for generations, and it built the kind of housing that goes with that — modest homes on modest lots, laid out close together within walking distance of where people worked. That history is still sitting on the rooflines I work on there.

Lower rooflines change the whole job

Most of the older Bremen housing stock is single storey. Compared with the two-storey builder homes east of the county that means shorter ladders, shallower pitches and far less of the run hanging in open air. Some of it is genuinely easier.

What it also means is that the roofline is closer to the viewer. On a tall house a slightly uneven bulb spacing disappears into the height. On a ranch the eave is barely above head height at the ends, so anybody walking up your drive is looking straight along the run. Spacing and tension are more visible on a low house, not less.

It also shifts where the light should go. On a low roofline the eave is one long horizontal line and not much else, so if that is all you do the house looks like a lit stripe. The things that give it depth are lower down — the porch, the columns, a wrapped trunk, the shrubs across the front. That is where I spend the time in Bremen.

Mature trees, and working around them

Older streets means canopy that has had fifty or more years to fill in, and that cuts both ways. A big hardwood over the front yard hides a lit roofline from the road, and its limbs are in the way of the ladder that would put the lights up there in the first place.

The answer is usually to stop fighting it. A trunk with low branching wrapped from the base takes the light down to where it can actually be seen from the street, under the canopy rather than behind it. On a good number of Bremen properties the tree ends up doing more work than the roof does.

Detached garages and outbuildings

The other Bremen fixture is the detached garage or workshop sitting off to the side of the house rather than built into the front of it. It is a second roofline, usually with its own small gable, and it is nearly always in the frame when somebody looks at the property from the road.

Light the house and leave that dark and the eye goes straight to the gap. It does not take much — the gable and the eave, matched to what is on the house — but it is the difference between a lit house and a lit property. There are two garages done that way in the gallery.

Being straight about Bremen

There are outfits already hanging lights around Bremen, and some of them are good. I am not going to pretend the town has been waiting for me.

What I offer is a specific thing: one person, start to finish. The person who quotes it is the person on the ladder, the person you call if a run goes dark, and the person who comes back for it in January. On a smaller older property where the job is fiddly and the detail matters more than reach, that is worth something.

Bremen is a drive, so houses out that way get grouped into the same days. Call early in the season and it is far easier to put you in one. What is actually in the job is set out on what you get.