When is it time?

I normally start once October comes around, although this year I've been doing some prep during September due to upgrading my mega tree's star. I do tend to begin with the less obvious elements and leave the most obvious Christmassy stuff (e.g. Santa, etc) until November. But that is just me.
 
I usually start late Nov as it usually only takes a few days (weather permitting.) However despite knowing where everything goes each year and having some small hardware in place like roof/wall mounts all year round, this bit me in the butt last year as work, weather & life got in the way and resulted in a scaled back display after the first 10 days of Dec.
Seeing as I am adding thousands of pixels this year, I plan to start setup early Nov once I pack away my Halloween prop display (no lights or sequences, just props/decorations)
 
Last year, my first year, I started getting props out "this weekend" -the October long weekend in Sydney. That's because I wanted to get props in place to measure out cable lengths I needed, and give myself time to do all the pigtail soldering and any other mounting I needed to do.

This year, I plan to start late October, only because I have a week or two in November that's burnt due to other commitments.
 
When I did Christmas only I would start 3 weeks before i plan to switch on, allowing myself 2 weeks for setup and 1 for testing.
Now that I do Halloween as well I usually start 2 week into October, however I have a few things to do so will start putting up the outline onto the roof this weekend seeing as Im up there anyways :)
 
Excluding building new bits and new programming etc, in the last week in November I start testing everything and doing minor repairs, replace pixels, replace o-rings etc. Then 2 or 3 days to install and then lights on 1st December. I tried to make it a 1 day install but, and this may surprise people, my display keeps growing. Or it may be I got lazy and start at 10 and finish by 2, just so I am working in the heat of a NQ Summer. Might have to reconsider that plan.
I put all my winter display props out in 1 day, then cabled the next day and turned them on that night. I could have possibly done it all in oneday but i started late and finished early on the first day. My house has conduit clips all over the front that stay up all year round
 
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