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Health & Fitness

In the Gutter

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I hope you’ll permit me this extra-long post today. It’s about a particularly fascinating topic: gutters.

Now, for the first 32 years of my life I lived in apartments, and the only gutters I knew about were where all the junk collected near the sidewalk, or where my ball went at the bowling alley. The first time I had gutters on my roof was when we moved to a Westchester condo 26 years ago, but then pretty much the only thing I had to do about them was tip the maintenance guys liberally at holiday time.

Alas, when we moved to a real house in Stamford last May, the maintenance guys at our old condo steadfastly refused to accompany us. And we arrived just in time for tulip tree shedding season, during which this evil tree in our backyard ejected thousands upon thousands of pinkish, blossomy things onto our roof. There were windy days when I could stand on my deck and feel like the winning contestant on American Idol as these things literally rained down upon me. To make matters worse, these pod-like objects were sticky, and adhered to our patio furniture, our shoes and our dog, who then brought them into the house, so that we were constantly picking them up off the floor.

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But here’s what I cared most about: the friggin’ tree was filling my gutters with flowery flotsam and I didn’t have my condo guys to clean them out!

I knew that I certainly wasn’t going up on our roof. It would be the equivalent of being the guy in horror movies who says, "It’s probably nothing; let me go out to the shed and check it out."

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So I went online to research gutter covers and read all the reviews of products called Gutter Helmet, Gutter Guard, Gutter Glove, Gutter Topper, Gutter Protec, Gutter Pro, LeafGuard, Leaf Proof, Leaf Free, Flo-Free, and Permaflow. I discarded the last two immediately because they sounded like prescription medications that reduce the need to go to the bathroom. From the rest, I chose the model that was so technologically advanced it went up on the space shuttle to prevent space microbes from getting in its gutters. Well, not really. But it had surgical-grade stainless steel mesh and a hardened anodized aluminum frame and electric ice melters and it sounded like it could simply vaporize any leaves that got past its initial defenses.

Most of all it promised to "eliminate gutter cleaning forever."

Yes! That was what I wanted! And I was all ready to spend $2600 on just such a system.

Then I starting asking around locally–you know, real people who don’t spend their lives reviewing stuff online–and the consensus was that none of the gutter covers keep out everything, and they actually make it harder to get out the stuff that does get in. And besides, everyone told me, why would you spend all that money when you can just get some roofers in twice a year to clean them out?

I was overcome with joy. It was like having my condo guys after all! 

Except that we then discovered a flaw in our gutters, which was that the downspouts got easily clogged with all the stuff that the trees were throwing into them, and the water backed up where the gutters met at a right angle, right over our front door, so that every time it rained, we had to race through a small waterfall to get inside. We called the roofing company, and they sent some guys out who walked around on our roof for awhile before saying, "You know, you could really use some gutter covers."

The good news was that we didn’t need the $2600 super-high-tech electrified space shuttle roof gutter protection system. Just a basic $350 cover would do. So that’s what we did.

And then I started thinking about winter. One of my earliest memories of the house we currently live in was in February of 2011, when we arrived for our second look at the house to find the owner on the roof, shoveling snow.

I had shoveled very little snow in my life, and was not looking forward to acquiring this chore at age 57, which is near the age of people you always see on the local news recovering from the strokes they had while shoveling snow. And since I was dreading having to shovel snow on the ground, I certainly had no plans to go up on the roof to do it.

Also, when we first moved to our condo, we had a terrible flashing problem. I do not mean that our neighbors had a tendency to run by our kitchen window naked. "Flashing," I found out then, is a piece of roofing material that is supposed to prevent "ice damming," which is when water freezes on the roof, backs up and leaks through into the home and the home owner says "Damn ice is causing a flood again!"

We solved this problem with an elaborate installation of roof wires that would heat up when we turned on a switch in our bedroom closet. If the water didn’t freeze, it didn’t back up, and it didn’t dam. True, I was always afraid our roof would catch fire from the wires, but that never happened.

So in November, we had an electrician install roof wires on our new house. What we didn’t know was that this wire was not the same as the wire we had in Westchester, which just went on the roof. This one went in and out of the gutters. Which made it impossible for the gutter covers to stay on. Which is why, the morning after the wire was installed, our lawn was littered with the gutter toppers that had blown off the roof.

Which meant we probably would have been better off with the $2600 super-high-tech electrified space shuttle roof gutter protection system in the first place.

And what is the moral of this story? It is that you cannot do one thing to a house without it affecting other things. It is a domino effect similar to the theory that got us into Vietnam in the 1960s.

It was a war we could have won, if only the military had been equipped with a super-high-tech electrified space shuttle roof gutter protection system.

For more on our adventures as first-time homeowners at age 57, and moving to Stamford, visit http://theupsizers.wordpress.com/

 

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