YULE NEED A PRO!
THEY’RE NOT YOUR grandmother’s Christmas lights — and that’s not Grandpa on the ladder stringing them up.
As Christmas decorations get bigger and glitzier each year, more homeowners are paying professionals thousands of dollars to transform their homes into storybook winter wonderlands.
“Every year it keeps growing,” said William Badyna, 39, who shelled out more than $10,000 this year for Christmas decorator Nando DiMeglio to string thousands of lights and figurines around his Brooklyn home.
“It’s a lot of work,” Badyna said. “I definitely wouldn’t be able to do it myself.”
For DiMeglio and other Christmas contractors, business is booming in Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island and on Long Island as homeowners decide it’s easier — and the results are more spectacular — to pay someone else to deck the halls.
“We turn people down. We just don’t have time,” said James Bonavita, of B&R Christmas Decorators in Brooklyn, who charges between $500 and $10,000 to outfit homes with lights, garlands and movable figures. “Everyone wants to keep up with their neighbors. It’s about competing with the Joneses.”
Badyna’s display has gotten so big he also had to spend $3,000 to upgrade his home’s electricity — but he said it’s worth it.
“Christmas was always the biggest holiday in my house,” said Badyna, who lives on 78th St. in Bay Ridge with his wife, Angelique, and four kids. “We love it when people come by to see the lights.”
Lou Nasti, whose Brooklyn company, Mechanical Displays, specializes in elaborate motorized carousels and dancing 15-foot toy soldiers, charges $20,000 or more to adorn a home with custom decorations — and still he got about 15 more requests than he could get to this year.
Nasti charges 30% to 50% of the initial cost to take down the display, store it and put it up again the following year.
“Most of the men who buy from me don’t want their wives to know how much they spend,” he added.
One of Nasti’s customers, Stephen Pansini of Staten Island, valued his prized collection of some 50 animated Christmas figures and countless lights at nearly $200,000.
“I don’t display them all at once. Every year I change them around,” said Pansini, an electrician who lives on Kingdom Ave. and installs them himself. “I’m just infatuated with it. If it moves, I have to have it.”
Frank Lepore used to spend a month and a half stringing his $2,500 light collection on his Dyker Heights, Brooklyn, home. No more: Now he pays DiMeglio about $1,300 to put it up and take it down.
“It’s totally worth it,” said Lepore, 28, an electrician who, like many others, puts out a drop box to collect donations for charity. “It gives me that warm, jolly feeling.”
Many spectators out enjoying the displays said it doesn’t much matter who is hanging them or how much they cost.
“If they have the money and enthusiasm to do it, it’s great,” said Robert Bateh, 31, on a recent visit to 84th St. near 12th Ave. in Dyker Heights— an epicenter of professionally hung Christmas lights. “It’s nice that people go all- out.”
Similarly, Paula Cottoy of Canarsie, Brooklyn, who stopped with her two sons to enjoy an extravagant display on Flatlands Ave., said, “I don’t care. I didn’t pay for it. I’m just glad they’re sharing with us.”
ehays@nydailynews.com