Get Your Head Into The Gutter

Most of you know that with home ownership, you inherit some things from the previous home owner.  In this case, it was some sort of gutter covers.  They don’t seem to be the actual “Gutter Helmet” brand but they do a similar task of keeping leaves out of the gutters.  Someone missed the basic function of keeping them in place when leaves are falling.  A few of these little panels had been removed for some reason.  ‘You know what that does?  It makes the ones left in place fill up and pack tight with leaves.

During some of our recent rain storms, my wife once again said the words I hate, “We have a problem”.   Water was somehow getting to the chairs on the front porch but when I looked at the ceiling, nothing was wet.   But I noticed my lawn tractor cover had mud on it almost 2 feet up from the ground.  Could the splash from a rainstorm make water travel that high to the chairs on the porch?   When I watched the water pouring over the gutters on our porch, it became clear there wasn’t a leak.  It was just the volume of water running over and hitting the porch that splashed up onto the lawn chairs.

I remembered seeing some of the gutter guard pieces somewhere and found a few in a shed that came with our new place.  Dirty, but I’m sure they’ll clean up after a dozen more rainstorms.  After several thousand trips up and down the ladder, I pieced the gutter guards back together.  I don’t mind doing anything like this if I have the tools.  In this case, one of the necessary tools was an electric screwdriver with a socket-head tool to run the hex head sheet metal screws into the gutter.

The other tool-ish thing was this thing.  It was a gift from my wife that I thought was sort of silly but this magnet thing holds a ton of screws that are readily available to be used without running up and down the ladder.  I will  never doubt again.  It really was handy.  The job was done in no time.  Looking forward to a big rain storm to see if my project worked.