I figured that after the monster in my daughter’s front yard was gone, I would be free of gutter-cleaning duty.
But all of the recent wind and rain managed to find little sticks, bits of leaves and those maple-seed helicopters from elsewhere and fly them right into her second-story rain gutters.
It had been raining almost nonstop for two days. Three inches fell in less than 48 hours, and it was still coming. And the gutters were clogged and overflowing.
So during what I thought was a lull between rains — a pause that ended soon after we put the ladder up to her house, of course — I was cleaning out gutters.
I had gotten pretty good at this. Daughter No. 2 bought her century home three years ago, and the monster in the front yard had loaded up the gutters frequently during spring, summer and fall. Mostly in the fall, but clogged is clogged, so we borrowed a ladder from one of her three neighbor Steves and made quick work of the muck.
The monster had packed the gutters so full for so long before our daughter bought the house that little monsters were growing in the gutters, and the drainpipes to the street were jammed so tight with goo that we abandoned them, dug new trenches and put in new drainpipes to get the water away from her house.
And why do we care whether the rain gutters are clogged? Because in her case — and in most cases — much of what overflows the gutters will end up in the basement and could undermine the foundation.
I stood in her basement during a heavy rain soon after she bought the house and watched as water gushed through cracks in the walls like a multiheaded fountain. It was terrifying, and we cleaned the gutters the next day. Within a few weeks, we installed the new pipes to the street.
Her basement has been dry since then.
But no thanks to the three-headed monster in the front yard.
Actually, this beast was beautiful. It was a massive maple that towered over her house. It was easily twice as tall as the house.
One of its three crowns was attached to a trunk that reached toward the neighbor’s house to the north. Another hung out to the east over the street and a bus stop where children waited, then entered and exited school buses each day. And that one was also over a lot of wires that power the neighborhood, which is why the power company was so interested in taking it down.
The third trunk leaned toward our daughter’s bedroom, which made for sleepless nights when the wind howled.
If any of them had been downed by a strong wind, it could have killed someone. Or several someones — including our daughter.
So for those reasons first and foremost, we were happy when the electric company declared the tree dangerous and sent a crew to take it down.
One of the men behind the chainsaws said it was the largest tree he had ever taken down. Members of the crew estimated it was about as old as the house — a little over a century.
We’ll never know. We couldn’t count the rings because the center of the trunk was so punky. From the outside, we couldn’t have known how rotten it was on the inside.
It made us even more grateful that after a long day, the tree-cutting crew had taken the monster down to a stump that is nearly 4 feet across and barely visible to passersby.
Somehow, however, its legacy lives on in the rain gutters. For now.
Alan D. Miller is a former Dispatch editor who teaches journalism at Denison University and writes about old house repair and historic preservation based on personal experiences and questions from readers.
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@youroldhouse
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Old House Handyman: It’s the season for gutter and drainpipe cleaning
Reporting by Alan D. Miller / The Columbus Dispatch
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
