If you’ve been telling yourself you’ll “get to the gutters sometime this fall,” here’s the thing nobody tells homeowners: that window closes hard, not gradually. “Once it’s too icy, I don’t even do it anymore,” says Jac Olson, owner of My Hearthside. “At that point I start focusing on Christmas lights instead.” That’s not a…
If you’re buying or selling a home in Utah County, gutters probably aren’t the first thing on your mind, until they show up on an inspection report. That’s exactly what happened to a recent buyer here. Their home inspection came back with a clear red flag: two gutters completely full of debris, and both downspouts…
At My Hearthside, I stick to what I actually do well: window washing, gutter cleaning, solar panel cleaning, and Christmas light installation. That’s my craft, and I’d rather be great at those four things than stretch myself thin trying to cover everything else a home might need. That means if a job ever turns up…
After the last big rainstorm rolled through Utah County, I started hearing the same complaint from customers and folks around town: mosquitoes, and a lot of them. More often than not, the cause traced right back to clogged gutters holding standing water. It makes sense once you think about it. Gutters packed with leaves, cottonwood…
It’s one of the most common things homeowners tell me: “I don’t have trees near my house, so my gutters should be fine.” It’s an understandable assumption, and it’s wrong more often than people expect. Trees are the obvious cause of a clogged gutter, but they’re far from the only one. On a recent job…
Most homeowners think of gutter overflow as a minor nuisance: a little water spilling over the edge during a storm. In reality, that overflow is one of the most common, and most expensive, causes of hidden roof damage I see on jobs across Utah County. How It Happens When a gutter clogs with leaves, cottonwood…
A lot of homeowners install gutter guards and assume that’s the end of the story: no more cleaning, no more ladders, no more worrying about it. We get why. But on a recent job, we found proof that “guarded” doesn’t mean “maintenance-free.” What Happened The homeowner called us because they could see something was off…
Yes, in my experience pine needles are actually the tougher problem, more so than leaves. Leaves are easy to get out. Pine needles are a different story. They get stuck in a scoop, and they’ll get stuck in a gutter vacuum too, so they just take more time to clear. It’s not the worst thing…
No — and this is one of the most common misconceptions homeowners have. Gutter guards help, but they don’t eliminate the need for cleaning. I’ve had to pull guards back off a number of times to clear out what built up underneath and inside them anyway. What actually gets through the guards Fine dust and…
They do, more than most homeowners expect. Gutters are one of the first things a home inspector checks, because they’re a fast, visible signal of how well the rest of the home has been maintained — and because the damage they can cause (foundation, fascia, roof) is expensive enough that inspectors are trained to flag…