One such job for me is cleaning the gutters. I have four 100Ft cedars within gutter range of my house and my gutters regularly fill up with debris. Mine were particular bad because, due to a recent illness, some had not been cleaned out in over a year.
Well, as it is Christmas time, I went to put up my Christmas lights. One of the locations I hang my lights is from clips attached to the gutters at the front of the house. As I went to install the clips, I was reminded of my tardiness in cleaning out the gutters and decided I better buckle down and get the job done.
Well, was I ever pleasantly surprised. It has been freezing for a couple of days now and
everything in the gutter was frozen solid. As the gutters had not been draining properly due to the debris, there was some residual water in the bottom of the troughs that allowed the whole mass of leaves, needles, peanuts (deposited by the local Stellar Jays), various small plants with roots, etc. to be frozen solid. At first I was quite annoyed as tried to break through the mass to remove it, but after I was able to get the first bit out the job got a lot easier. With a small garden trowel, I was able to pry up between 6" - 12" frozen slabs of debris with little effort.A job, that I had usually dreaded, took forever, and was messy, had almost become fun and was done in 10 minutes. Another benefit of doing this task in the freezing weather was that the ground was frozen (couple of inches or so), and as such the ladder would not sink in to the various gardens it needed to transverse to complete the project.
My only word of warning is to not pry the slabs straight up and out of the gutter as they may hang up on the edge of the roofing and because it is also frozen, it will be quite brittle. Pry up the slab to separate from the gutter and then rotate the slab so that the outer face comes out first followed by the surface that was against that back fascia.
Now I am going to go around the whole house to see what other maintenance issues are maid easier by the freezing weather. Have a great holiday season.
Cheers,
Sean
