The Rain, It's Plain, Strays Mainly from the Drain

Ah, winter! The days get shorter, the holidays are approaching. There's a special nip in the air. And it starts raining. That means it's time to clean the gutters.

When the serious rain started last week, we saw that the water was pouring out over the edges of the gutters, not down the drainpipes like it's supposed to. One especially annoying drip was right over the front door. When it's raining heavily you know to avoid the waterfall, but if it's just sprinkling a bit, the drip can catch you out. Splat! Hah, tricked another one!

Every one of the gutters seemed to be overflowing instead of draining properly. It was almost perfectly inverted: The downspouts were all empty, and the gutters were all overflowing from the edges instead. It's like the water was avoiding the downspouts. Time to clean 'em all out.

The gutters on our house are wood, not metal or fiberglass or extruded plastic. They're carved, often lined with lead, and built-in to the structure of the house. Meaning they don't come off and can't easily be replaced. They're also a nuisance to clean.

For starters, the gutters are up high (duh), but they ring the house on the second floor only. That means they're more than 30 feet up from the ground, and I can't reach them with any ladder that I have. (Full disclosure: I'd frankly be uncomfortable standing atop a 30-foot ladder even if I had one.) So the only way to reach the gutters is by climbing out on the roof—not happening—or by leaning out the 3rd-floor windows with a long pole. We went the pole route.

Our cunning scheme was to attach a garden trowel to the end of a long pole and lean through the windows, digging away at the leaves and crud in the gutters. Soon the dam would break and the water would flow happily down the drainpipes and back to the sea! Flow, little water! Run home!

That was all hilarious fun, but it didn't work as well as expected. I collected lots of nutrient-rich crud from the gutters, but managed only to smear it all over the side of the house. It looked like we were patching a wattle-and-daub cottage. There's also no good way to get the trowel/stick arrangement down into the drainpipes, which is where the real problem was. And, since this all happened in the pouring rain, the gutters filled up again just as fast as I could empty them all over the outside of our formerly white house.

Plan B was to wait for the rain to stop and climb outside. There are a couple of flat spots on the roof that are fairly accessible (read: no helicopter required), so taking my now-patented stick with me, I managed to ream out a few of the drains. The obscene glorp, slurggle, slurggle! sound the water makes as it finally breaks through the blockage and starts draining made it all worthwhile.

So the gutters are mostly clear now, but it's stopped raining so I can't even enjoy my victory. I'm tempted to take a garden hose and actually pour water on the roof just so I can see those suckers drain like they're supposed to. But I'll wait. It's supposed to start raining again in a few days. Good thing, too, because that mud is still all over the outside of the house and I'm really hoping the rain will wash it off.