Last Saturday Greg came in from the garage holding the old aluminum extension ladder and said, "This thing has a wobble." He'd been using that ladder since we bought the house in 1999, so I believe him. That started a longer conversation than either of us expected, and it ended with a rule.
For twenty-five falls, cleaning the gutters has been Greg's job. He'd get up there on a Saturday morning in late October, scoop the leaves into a bucket, run the hose down the downspouts and be done in about an hour. Our house is a split-level, so the gutters are low on the front and over the garage, around ten feet, but the back side over the family room is a full two stories. That's about eighteen feet to the edge.
Greg is 58 now, with a bad left knee, and he's on his feet on a bakery route five days a week. I'd been nervous about that back side for a few years and hadn't said much. This year I said something.
The new ladder rule
We sat at the kitchen table and wrote it down. I'm sharing it because I suspect a lot of couples our age are having the same conversation, or should be.
- Nobody goes on a ladder when they're home alone. The other person is outside, at the foot of the ladder, holding it.
- Nobody goes above a 6-foot stepladder or the first story of the extension ladder. The two-story side gets hired out.
- No ladder work in the rain, in wind or after 4:00 p.m. when it's getting dark early.
- The old wobbly ladder is retired.
Greg's response was, "We'll see." Which, after all these years of marriage, I know means "I'm not going to fight you on this."
A new ladder for the low side
We went to Lowe's and bought a sturdy 6-foot fiberglass stepladder with a wide top step for $139, and a gutter scoop and a pair of long gloves for $16. Fiberglass costs more than aluminum but it's heavier and steadier, and that's the point. I also bought a pair of stabilizer arms for the old extension ladder, then returned them, because we decided the extension ladder should go to the curb. It went last Tuesday.
With the stepladder, Greg can reach the front gutters and the garage gutters from the ground side. I hold the ladder and hand him the bucket. It took us about forty minutes for those sections, and it was a pleasant enough way to spend a Saturday morning, with the radio on and the Hendersons waving from across the way.
Pricing the job for the back
For the two-story section, I called around for quotes on gutter cleaning. I asked each company to price the whole house and just the back side, because I wanted to know both numbers.
For the whole house, about 140 linear feet of gutter, the quotes came in at $165, $189 and $225. One of those included flushing the downspouts and the others charged extra for that. For just the back side, two of the three said they had a minimum charge, which came out to $125 and $140. The third wouldn't do partial houses.
Since the minimum was close to the full price anyway, we went with the full-house quote at $165 including downspouts. They came Thursday and were done in under an hour, which is about what Greg used to do it in, minus the risk of my husband falling off a ladder.
We'll need it twice a year, spring and fall, since we have two big maple trees in our neighborhood that drop on our roof. That's $330 a year if prices hold. I added it to the household budget as a line item, right under the lawn mower tune-up.
Was it worth it?
I've done the math a couple of ways. $330 a year is real money. But an emergency room visit, or a broken wrist that keeps Greg off his route for six weeks, would cost us far more. Neither of us can afford for him to miss work right now, and he plans to work about six more years. It's the cheapest insurance we have.
The other piece I didn't expect: Greg seemed a little relieved. He'd never say so, but when the crew finished he walked the back of the house, looked up at the clean gutters and said, "They did a decent job." Then he went inside and watched the Bengals.
We also switched our home and auto insurance this week, which saved us some money and which I'll write about soon. Between that and the new ladder rule, it's been a week of grown-up decisions in our house. I'm going to celebrate with a nap.
