Holiday Lighting Guy

A terrible experience. My wife was in a holiday mood, and agreed to pay RIC about $2700 to light our house for Christmas. This is more than we paid to paint the whole thing recently. He had a fancy web site claiming that he was located in Beverly Hills with lots of stock photos and unsubstantiated claims. It stated that he was licensed, but there was no evidence of this -- no contractor's license number. No evidence of insurance, either. I take it he is really based in LaHabra. I can only say that we were heavily involved in some business stuff, and were not paying attention. The results were very ugly in the day time, with big wads of black tape everywhere. RIC sees himself as an artist, which strikes me as laughable. Many of the lights immediately stopped working, and we finally fixed a lot of them ourselves. The lights were very cheap, and we had to replace some of them. Many calls were made, but it took two weeks for him to show up to fix what we didn't fix ourselves. His claim of 24 hr. repairs is a joke. I notice his web site is down today. I hope it will be more honest when it goes back up. He has never showed up to take the lights down, and we'll have to pay someone else to do that. The only good thing I can say about the experience is that no one fell off the roof.

Our first time doing something like this. They guys were careful of plants and trees, and did an excellent job. When one tree set blinked out, they were out in less than 24 hours to fix it. It's expensive, but it was a lot of lights and climbing. Had we JUST done the house itself, it would have been in the $600 range. We were told we will get a **15% discount** if we return next year. I enjoed working with Ric, the experience was stressfree and the finished effect was stunning. Hated to see them take it down. I would do it again in a heartbeat.