I turned 30 on Saturday at the top of a ladder. Tessa footed it, handed me a coffee on one of my trips down and said, "Happy birthday. Your present is that I'm holding this." Our silver maple doesn't care about birthdays. It drops its leaves over about three weeks from late October into November, and the gutters fill on its schedule, not mine.
This was the second cleaning in two weeks. The first was the Saturday before Halloween. Last fall I learned the hard way that one cleaning under this tree doesn't do it, so this year I planned for two from the start.
My ladder setup
The Cape helps here. The eaves on a one-and-a-half-story house are low, and our gutters are 5-inch aluminum from 2013. I do all of it from the 24-foot extension ladder I bought on Marketplace for $90, never extended very far, and I don't set foot on the main roof. It's steep and I'm not brave. The detached garage has a gutter on the maple side too, and that one is even lower.
Three small things made it a lot less miserable this year:
- A ladder standoff. It bolts to the top of the ladder and rests against the roof edge instead of the gutter, so I'm not crushing the aluminum and I've got room to work in front of me.
- A bucket hook. A 5-gallon bucket hanging from a rung means both hands stay free, one for the ladder and one for the scoop.
- A narrow plastic gutter scoop. It fits a 5-inch gutter, and it doesn't scratch like the garden trowel I used last year.
The rule I follow is simple: my belt buckle stays between the rails. If I have to reach, I come down and move the ladder. On the back run that meant nine moves each time. Tessa holds the base on the soft spots, and she does it with a lot less nervous commentary than I would if our roles were switched. She's better on ladders than I am. We both know it.
Round one and round two
On October 25th about half the leaves were still on the tree. I pulled out five buckets of wet, packed leaves, plus a layer of black muck underneath that included this June's maple helicopters. A few of them had sprouted. There were tiny maple trees growing in our gutter, which tells you something about how long that stuff had been sitting there.
My mistake that day was the order. I did the garage first, then the back of the house, then the front. By the time I finished the front, the wind had refilled a good chunk of the garage gutter. It felt a lot like doing a cycle count while the truck is still unloading. I went back up and did the garage again, which added forty minutes I didn't need to spend.
The hoses were already hung up in the garage for winter, so flushing the downspouts meant carrying buckets of water up from the basement and pouring them in from the ladder. The back downspout elbow was clogged solid. A few taps with the scoop handle and one more bucket cleared it.
Round two on November 8th was easier. The tree was nearly bare, the gutters held four buckets instead of five, and I did the garage last. Then I ran the EGO leaf blower I bought in October ($129, same battery as the mower) over the back lawn and blew the whole mess into a pile by the raised beds for Tessa's compost. About two hours, start to finish.
The plan for next fall
Two cleanings, nine buckets, about four and a half hours on a ladder. That's every fall for as long as the maple is there, and we like the maple. The arborist who looked at it in June recommended pruning the deadwood this winter, which might help a little with twigs, but it won't change the leaves.
So gutter guards are on the someday list. I measured while I was up there: the back of the house plus the garage comes to about 52 feet, and that's where nearly all of the mess lands. The front barely gets anything. I'd rather not pay for guards on gutters that don't need them, so whatever we do, it'll probably start with just the back run.
My birthday dinner was takeout on the couch. I fell asleep before the second episode, which Tessa says is what 30 looks like.
