Life in the Gutter

My entire body is sore and my hands are a little scraped up, but I actually feel great after finishing our gutters this weekend. About a month ago we took a 10% off coupon to The Home Depot and bought enough vinyl guttering to replace our old, rusted, dripping aluminum gutters. The old gutters were just ugly and the downspouts didn't stay attached to the gutters very well. We thought that maybe we should hire someone to redo our gutters, but eventually decided to tackle the project ourselves.

Our house has four different sections of guttering. Two of them are small, the one on the backside of the porch and the one above the back kitchen door. The front of the house and the back are about 48 and 35 feet respectively. We struggled a little with the two small sections, and by the time we did the front, we had our system pretty well down, so it went up without too much trouble. But the back was another story.

The problem with the back was our sloping driveway into our basement garage. For the 12 feet in front of the garage door, the ladder we bought was way to small to reach the roof. But, thanks to Brooke's visiting teacher who let us know they had a collapsible 24 foot ladder, we were able to finally finish the job. John came over this afternoon and was a huge help too. It's aways nice to have friends you can count on in a pinch.

We're really pleased with how the gutters turned out. They look much better and hopefully they will work better too. Plus, we saved a ton of money doing it ourselves. Now, I guess it's on to the next project, whatever that will be.