Leaves, Gutters and You.

Yesterday, Avy worked on the house by herself for a while, since I was at work. She tore up some more carpet and whatnot. The place is looking better by the minute, and that funky smell is slowly but surely disappearing--thank god.

Funnily enough, Avy says the smell didn't seem too bad to her until she started working on the floors by herself. She says it hit her kind of suddenly when she pulled up a chunk of carpet in the bedroom.

But never mind that... let's talk about leaves, shall we?

This new neighborhood is full of trees, which is really quite lovely, especially in the fall/winter, with the leaves changing colors and falling, etc. But you know what's not so great about leaves? They fall on your house and wind up in your rain gutters, especially if your house is old-school, like The Serpico House. Long story short, I snuck a peek at the gutters over the weekend, and I was not pleased. The gutters are in fine shape, actually, but they're full of leaves. This is bad.

Leaves are the enemies of gutters--they clog them up and cause water to go places we don't want it to go... like into the house or the foundation of the house. Not good. I was able to sort of quickly push the leaves out of one gutter over the weekend, but most of the roof isn't too accessible without a ladder (and I ain't got one yet), so I had to accept the fact that I will not be able to to clear the gutters completely for a while. It sucks, but I have to think that if the gutters were OK thus far, they will be OK for a while longer.

I'm thinking it would be pretty sweet to upgrade our gutters to these bad boys...

I don't know what these things cost, but I'm gonna guess it's expensive--whenever they don't list the price online, you know it's not cheap. Damned if this doesn't look like a really good idea, though, but I'm going to ignore this option for a while. I can clean gutters until I can afford to add the snazzy, self-cleaning kind.

I really don't like the idea of climbing around on the roof, pawing leaves out of the gutters, but it's obviously not beyond the realm of my abilities. It's obviously not a complex activity, but it's not pleasant. And paying someone to do it? Well, I don't mind paying for a valuable service, but I also don't have money for that kind of stuff.

Of course, there are other options. Like this thing, for example.

Seems pretty straight-forward, right? We just received a lovely leaf-blower as a gift from my folks (they no longer have a yard since they live in a high-rise condo now), so all I need to get would be the additional kit in order to make this happen, and then I could stand on the ground to do this. I like that idea. No ladders. Yes.