When decorating your home for the holidays, there are several different ways to attach your lights to the perimeter. One of the most common ways is to use standard clips, and those work very well for a variety of different materials and designs.
However, certain surfaces can make attaching lights a bit of a challenge. Brick can be particularly tricky, especially when trying to line areas such as windows and garages. However, hot glue can be the answer to your problems.
Hot glue is perfect for attaching Christmas lights to brick, and it can also be ideal for other surfaces, such as stucco. However, with stucco, exercise caution. Hot glue can melt the styrofoam that backs some thin stucco, causing the stucco to chip off.
Hot glue is an excellent option for affixing Christmas lights to your brick home or business, and it can be used in both hot and cold climates. Because hot glue is so convenient and effective, Jason from Christmas Designers made a video showing a sample installation using hot glue. In this blog, we will walk you through the process we used to attach our lights using hot glue and show you all the steps necessary to make a spectacular and secure holiday lights display.
Materials
For our demo video display, we used:
- Cool white C9 LED retrofit bulbs
- Red C9 LED retrofit bulbs
- 9” Empty socket light line
- Male vampire plugs
- Female vampire plugs
- Zip cord
- A hot glue gun
- Glue sticks
Process
In our demo, we started by lining the windows of the home with lights. As you attach them to the brick, ensure that the flair on each socket is hanging over the brick’s edge. Additionally, it is a bit easier if you screw your bulbs into the empty socket light line before applying the hot glue.
To glue the sockets into place, apply a line of hot glue to the base of the socket. Hold it in place for a few seconds as you attach it to the brick in order to make sure that it’s securely fastened, and then move on to the next socket.
An important consideration to keep in mind when attaching your lights is bulb orientation. You can choose either vertical or horizontal orientation. For our demo, we used a horizontal orientation because it matched the roofline. However, applying the hot glue at the bottom of the sockets for vertical orientation is a popular option as well.
Once finished with a specific area of your installation, such as a window, clip the empty socket light line and attach male and female plugs to either end. Even if you aren’t going to use the female end, it’s always advisable to add one to terminate the cord safety.
For our installation, we also used a zip cord to allow our light line to reach the power source. We placed a female vampire plug on one end of the zip line and plugged it into our empty socket light line. Then, we added a male to the other end and plugged it into our timer connected to the power source.
In our demo, we used the same procedure to line the garage, another tricky area, especially when dealing with a brick home. Additionally, keep in mind that the spacing of your light line does matter. For smaller spaces, like windows and smaller garages, such as the one in our demo, a smaller spacing works very well. For this reason, we used 9” spacing for our light line in this installation, as opposed to the popular 12” spacing light line.