A new approach to an autumn chore

It’s fall, and the leaves have been falling for a while; most of the trees on our street have fairly well been cleaned out. Fortunately, we hadn’t had much rain to speak of until this week. On Sunday afternoon, it was high time I cleaned out the rain gutters on our house.

Cleaning the gutters is such a dirty and slow task. Hoisting the ladder out, putting it up, climing up, cleaning out what I can reach, then getting down, moving the ladder, and repeating until done.... ick. Even if I climb up onto the roof, it’s quite a process, having to move the bucket along with me. Last year, I decided I’d just throw it on the ground, and clean it up afterward. Still messy, but a little less precarious than hauling a bucked up and down, or along the roof’s edge.

This year, I was wondering if there wasn’t some way I could make it go faster. I thought of trying my shop-vac, but realized that its hose is too short, and there was no way I was dragging the whole thing along the roof with me. Nina reminded me of our leaf vacuum thingy. It’s actually a leaf blower that you can attach a catch bag and a vacuum cone onto, to pick up all the leaves from your lawn. Take off the bag, and remove the cone, and it’s back to being a leaf blower.

So I dragged that thing up, and found that there was no way to get the end of the vacuum cone into the gap between the roof’s edge and the gutter’s lip in order to make the suction pull the leaves out. The cone is just too big.

Then it hit me. Why not just use the blower to blow the leaves out? They should still be dry, and come flying out. Could be fun!

Well, the gutters weren’t entirely dry. Turns out the rain from last weekend, and the residual moisture from the dew of the chilly mornings we’re getting kept a decent amount of mud in the bottom of the gutters. BUT -- it worked, anyway! Leaves came flying out, and then, so did the mud, raining down on the ground below, our cars in the driveway, the lower part of the roof, and, naturally, all over the nut with the leaf blower!

The first spatters caught me by surprise, and I thought, “Well, maybe not.” Then I saw just how effective this method was of cleaning not only the dry leaves out of the gutter, but also the wet leaves and the remaining sludge. It worked well, it worked fast, and if I kept at it, I could be inside and warm (after a hot shower) in record time. So, on I forged. I warned the kids to stay away, or to go get an old umbrella, and ran the blower all the way down along the front of the house. The front took about 8 minutes (not that I was counting), and the back took about 5, since it was less damp, and collects less foliage.

Now, I’m sure some one was looking down the street and saw me up there with a leaf blower, with leaves, muck, and debris blasting up out of the gutters, and down onto me, our house, and our yard, and thought, “That has to be the dumbest guy I’ve ever seen. Hauling a leaf blower along the roof -- he could fall and break his neck! Why doesn’t he just get a bucket and a ladder, and muck them out the way you’re supposed to?”

Then again, there were probably one or two guys who thought, “Man, I wish I’d thought of that.”

It feels so good to be an inspiration to people.