Cleaning Your Gutters

After a long winter of snow, sleet, and rain, it's time to pick up the yard and give your house a little makeover. Springtime is the time for paint touchups, yard cleaning, and general tidying in and out of your house. One of the tasks that may be on your "Spring Cleaning To-Do List" is cleaning out your gutters.

Throughout the fall and winter, your gutters probably have months-old leaves stuck in them, packed in by several snowstorms and rainstorms. If you want your gutters to be the most effective and useful, then you'll need to clean them out. Cleaning out gutters may not be the most exciting job in the world, but if done correctly, it doesn't have to take forever, and will leave you with nice and clean gutters.

When you clean your gutters, make sure that you have the proper materials and supplies, You'll need a scraper, a trash bag, a ladder, and anything that you think would be helpful in cleaning out mucky gutters. When you do clean out your gutters, make sure that you're wearing appropriate attire. Wear grubby jeans, a worthless t-shirt, and heavy-duty gloves. You don't want to clean those gutters out with your bare hands, so the gloves are a must. You also need to give yourself a good block of time to start and finish this project. It's best to start and finish all in one go, so that you don't have to convince yourself to go back and finish what you started.

Use the ladder and climb up on the roof where you can access your gutters. If you don't have good balance or coordination, you might want to have someone else clean your gutters. You'll need a good sense of balance and some degree of dexterity if you want to be the most successful. Use your scraping device to scrape out all the muck from the gutter. Take your time and really get all the dead leaves, bugs, and junk out of the gutter. You also might want a rag so you can wipe out any gunk that the scraper can't get. Move slowly and deliberately around the gutter, making sure that you really remove all the gunk from the gutters, especially when the gutter goes into the down spout.

When you're finished mucking out the gutters, take a bucket of water, and give the gutters a final rinse, pouring the water into the gutter so it runs all the way through, cleaning out any loose muck left behind. If you go about cleaning your gutters with patience, deliberateness, and attentiveness, then you'll have clean and clear gutters!