Tarkblog

One of the joys of moving into a new (old) house is that you have to spend some time making improvements. We’ve been hacking out a little bit her and there and based on what we want to accomplish and how fast we are at accomplishing it I’d say we’ve got 5 years of work ahead of us.

A few weeks ago I cleaned out the gutters. Half of them I just used a ladder to get to, and a few others I had to squeeze out a window and shimmy along the roof to do. However, there’s one gutter in the very front of the house which I am unable to get to because we don’t own a tall enough ladder. I stuck my hand out the window the other day and reached up into the gutter and, sure enough, it was full of leaves.

We had been borrowing an extension ladder from a coworker, but when I got it set up and began to climb it was just too flimsy and not quite tall enough to make it all the way up. So, we decided maybe we’d call in a professional.

We had the following items to be done:

Clean out gutter (note that it’s singular…all the rest are already clean)
Optionally, based on price, install a gutter guard in that gutter
Install a chimney cap

Where to turn to? Since we don’t have an Angie’s List for our area, I consulted the next best resource I knew: the yellow pages.

Now, in the handyman/housework area there was a list of 20-25 local people/businesses that offered these services. In an attempt to narrow it down, I used the best option I found:

I picked the 3 largest ads.

The wife called these people.

1 never answered
1 she left a message with
1 she got in contact with and he would come by that evening to check it out

The guy who came by didn’t bring a “tall enough ladder”, so he had to come by again the next day.

He did, and quoted the following:

$100 for the chimney cap
$100 to clean out the gutter
$200 for the gutter guard.

Ouch. I’ll pay for the chimney cap because I’m not climbing to the top of that thing, but $100 to clean out the gutter? Cmon, that’s less than 15 minutes work. The gutter guard is probably a little more intensive, but I can’t believe it would cost more than 30 bucks for this particular length of gutter. Highly inflated.

I’m quite surprised to have no heard back from the other two people. Seems like if you’re a handyman, you’d have a tough time getting work if you don’t return calls. But whatever.

So, tomorrow, I plan to buy a big extension ladder for the approximately $300 we would have paid for the gutter work and do it myself.

And as a bonus, I get to keep the ladder.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 23rd, 2006 at 5:59 am and is filed under Random Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.