Mortaine’s Blog

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I wanted to be a bit more clear about what gutter-cleaning entailed this weekend, because I know a lot of my LJ Friends are not homeowners and may be unfamiliar with the process….

My home is a three-story house, although there are actually five levels to it (i.e., there are rooms on five different levels). Because the house is built on a hill, each story is actually a little further back– essentially, my house is built diagonally.

Which means that there are no less than four roofs that have gutters on them.

Our old 12′ ladder could reach the roof at the back of the house, and from there I could climb onto nearly all of the other rooves, and had done so earlier this season to wash the skylights and clean the gutters. It’s a big clue that you should clean out the gutters when you can actually see sunlight reflecting off of the standing water in your gutters and onto the exterior of your house. Anyway, I couldn’t reach the one roof over the living room when I cleaned the gutters earlier. And that roof happens to have a lot of drainage issues. It’s also one of the furthest drops to the ground– or rather, the concrete driveway– from up there, and while I might have been able to jump from one roof down to the next, I would never have been able to get back up, and I would have been very likely to hurt myself or fall in the process– not good.

Have I mentioned that, perhaps because of my childhood experiences of jumping off of my grandparents’ roof and my treehouse, I do not appear to be afraid of heights?

Have I mentioned that John doesn’t appear to have had any relatives who would let him leap off of the roof? He would be fine if you could reach the gutters from the middle of the roof….

So, anyway…. I am now the “roofer” in our household. I got out there and cleaned out the gutters, a process that mainly entails me walking around, Windexing the skylights, then sitting down at the very edge of the roof and pulling wet leaves and redwood tree droppings out of the gutter drain and gutters (with my hands), then hosing the gutter down with a high-powered garden hose to rinse everything out. We never did this in the old house (ironic, since the old house was a single story), which is probably why we had to deduct money for roofing and gutters when we sold it. But I digress….

I was stymied this time by the gutter over by the front door. It’s about 30′ up, and after I tried flushing the crud out of the downspout drain in the gutter, something went horribly wrong. It got clogged.

Ever try to clear a clog that’s thirty feet up, around two bends in a downspout, and around/beneath the eaves? Yeah, I had no chance. I tried to snake it with a toilet snake, but couldn’t dislodge anything. John tried with the long snake, going from the ground and pushing the snake up the 30′ downspout, but still no joy. We considered Drain-o, but decided against for environmental reasons. Finally, as our last act of desperation, John snaked the garden hose up the downspout and I turned it on full blast when it reached the top.

Lo and behold, dirty, filthy, muddy, cruddy water came out. We turned the water off, pushed the hose further, ran the water again. After a few tries of this, I went back up to the roof and finished flushing out the downspout, now cleared of the debris that had been hanging it up for however long! Yay! Joy!

Yesterday:

I cleaned the gutters on my house. This required a lot of ingenuity, as one of the downspouts was completely clogged. We eventually cleared it, though. Yay– safe house for winter!

I went to Fiber Arts Day at Quail Hollow Ranch and spun yarn and taught people how to spin and had fun.

I watched the first disk of Lost with John. This was his idea– usually, getting hooked on a TV show is my thing, not his, but he suggested it, much to my surprise. I’d been planning to rent it some weekend when he wasn’t home. Anyway, we watched the first disk and I thought it was very good. John wanted them to hurry up and finish telling the story. *snicker*

Anyway, that’s pretty much what I did yesterday. Didn’t get any of the things done from my list this weekend– I am a bad, bad person who is going to Procrastinator’s Hell someday. I am, however, not heading for a nervous breakdown anymore.