It's DH's last day of work. We are going to the Weary Traveller afterward to drink. Woo hoo! Booze! And it's SUCH a beautiful day for it too.
Last night I cleaned the gutters. I used the fancy new ladder I finagled out of the storage purgatory and into our garage (you know those ladders that can everything including diapering a newborn?). It only took me about five minutes to figure out how to use it, and then two hours to get the courage to climb up onto the roof by myself. I mean...what would have happened if the ladder got knocked down by a sudden, forceful gust of wind? Or what would have happened if I had gotten blown off the roof? Some serious ouches, that's what. But sucked it up and did it. Wow -- scooping out piles of sludge isn't my favorite thing in the world to do. However, it's better than seeing water drain next to the house and seep into the basement.
I even did a little raking.
This afternoon my goal is to start insulating the windows. Just in case those predictions of a %60 increase in energy and heating are true. Saving money doesn't hurt me in the slightest. I just wish we had some kind of wood burning option -- I can just imagine the amount of heat we would save using that as a supplement. Of course, the extra benefit might get eaten up the extra you pay in house insurance. I don't know what it is because obviously we don't have a fireplace.
I wish I could clone myself.
posted by hadjare @ 12:53 PM
5 Comments:
It's only 16$ extra to have the wood furnace insurance wise. It's nice because its almost free heat (only have to pay the electricity to run the fan) but extra work other ways. Of course..a little extra work is better than $2.50 per gallon of propane...
jess
Did you wear gloves? You're my hero. I climbed a ladder onto the roof once when I was a teenager and I could not get down. I sat up there, as a proud teenager, and was reduced to crying and clinging to the edge, begging for someone to knock the screen out of the second story window for me to climb in, rather than go down the ladder. My brother had to come up and coach me down. How sad.
My friends had a old iron looking stove thing installed in his place -- wood burning, the thing is awesome. Heats the place up real nice -- they use their heating in the mornings.
Cost a bit to install but it looks good, and it does the job nicely -- and of course its saving them a ton of cash!
one simple thing you can do with ladders to make them more stable [and certainly to keep them from falling down when the wind blows] is to tie them off.
now, this is easy if you have some obvious, suitable structure to tie them to, like a nearby chimney [that is in good repair, of course] or some handy architectural elements that'll hold up under the strain - you just get some rope [and even clothesline'll do in a pinch] and tie that baby off; preferably in two places, to minimize the chance of pullout.
but again, lets say there are no obvious places to tie off, or that you lack 30+ feet of rope. what you can do is take a couple scraps of 2x4's and make yourself an anchor to tie to. i haven't seen your house, so i don't know what the best design for you would be but some ideas i've seen include:
- simply nailing the boards onto the roof in an inconspicious place and leaving them there [because if you pull out the nails you've just created a leak] and caulking around them to provide a water barrier. painting them to blend in with the roof is a good idea too but you'd be surprised how many people blow that off... this is kind of a hillbilly, ohio-valley sorta solution, to be honest, but it's better than the alternatives, like the ladder being blown over while you're up on the roof or, worse, climbing it.
- building a crude gutter plug that gives the ladder something to attach too. basically, you would be creating a hook, of sorts, that goes into the gutter and ties off to the ladder. you need to make sure your gutters aren't hanging on the house by a thread, of course, and it isn't something you want to depend on for your life, but it'll definitely keep the ladder from falling over in the wind if you do it right.
pretty much the worse thing in the world is to prop a stepladder up over some bushes on loose soil, a stepladder that only reaches to about a foot below your eaves and then you climb onto the roof because it almost reaches... and it doesn't sound like you did THAT, so you're already way smarter and safer than a lot of people.
well, yes; i HAVE seen your house. but i wasn't looking at it with an eye toward climbing up on the roof or anything, so i probably should have said "i don't remember the specifics of your roof situation, but..."
actually, now that i think of it, you have a little carport walkway thing the term for which i can't remember, right? depending on how that is arranged and what kind of roof access that gives you, it might be a good place to anchor off on. especially because a minor leak near the edge there isn't going to cause you any real concern, right?
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