by Catherine Lear

Created on: May 16, 2009   Last Updated: July 16, 2009

Gutters are the funny plastic things that you see at the top of your house just below the roof. They take all the rain water from of the roof and stops it making a mess all over your pathways and garden.

I own a property business and have done since I left university. I buy or manage houses and apartments but in most cases all the houses that I have brought and in total at the moment I have thirty. I have had to replace the guttering. The one thing that I have noticed is that when my workers replaced the old guttering for the new plastic guttering the old wooden ones were full of rubbish. This is because the previous owners were far too lazy to clean them out once a year.

Then the other thing that I noticed was that under where the old guttering was there was a very nasty mess were the water from the roof that should have run down into the downspout but went over the guttering falling onto the ground. This meant that I had to clean the pavement or re seed the lawn. This meant that I was spending far beyond my budget that I had for each property.

Usually when a homeowner cleans out his or her guttering they use a ladder, but did you know that there are more accidents from falling from a height than of any other accidents in the home or at your work place? This is because the person that climbs a ladder does not know how to put one up at the right angle or he or she will over reach and lose there balance. What makes it worse is that when the person climbs the ladder even if they have put it up at the right angle they will take up with them all the tools that they need. The tools that they need are as follows- one empty bucket to put all the rubbish in, one trawl to take all the rubbish out of the gutter, clean rags to clean the outside of the gutter, and one bucket full of warm soapy water.

I know all this because when I asked one of my workers to clean out a gutter that needed cleaning, he proceeded to erect the ladder and take all the equipment up with him. How he never fell off the ladder, I will never know, and when I checked his work, I can tell you he had done a very bad job and it took him quite some time to do this very bad job.

This you might think was the workers fault that he was a bad worker. The fault though was mine I had asked him to do the work working of a ladder were he had to balance himself most of the time he was working. Now all my workers when cleaning out guttering have to use a scaffold, now you might think this is going

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>