Is Gutter Cleaning Important? A Homeowner’s Tell-All Horror Story
One of our customers reached out to us with a story she was working on for a writing project. She wanted to thank us for helping her out during Hurricane Sandy.
It’s always great to hear from happy customers like Cecilia G. from New Jersey:
Dear Reader,
Maybe you’re like me.
We bought our house a few years ago — it wasn’t our first home, but we moved from a place with virtually no trees (the Arizona desert) and into a part of the country that was covered in trees (rural New Jersey).
Back in Arizona, rain was sparse, and gutters were nothing more than an afterthought. We knew that they were there — that our home had gutters installed. No big whoop.
Fast forward to 2012 — Hurricane Sandy blew through our new home state.
It was already October, and leaves had started to pile up on our roof.
Fast forward to the aftermath.
Once Sandy hit, we were basically blindsided. Our roof was now home to tree branches, leaves, debris and the neighbor’s goat (just kidding about the goat part — but were it true, it’d have been a young goat; kid pun intended)
Not only was our roof a mess, we had some standing water around our house.
Not good.
Our gutter drains had gotten so clogged over the past couple of years that, by the time we realized what the problem was, it was too late.
Guess what we found in the basement?
Standing water, a mildewy smell and, is that? — yeah, there was mold starting to grow on the basement wall.
That didn’t take long to escalate.
My husband and I started trying to figure out what to do. We got a sump pump and got the water out of the basement, but that didn’t fix the cause of the basement flood. We were very concerned about our house’s foundation.
We did some research on Angie’s List, Home Advisor and on Facebook.
A friend of ours recommended we reach out to Ned Stevens.
When we called, they could not have been more sympathetic (come to think of it, they were probably really busy after Sandy).
They quoted us on gutter cleaning and, when the service techs got to our house, they were really nice and gave us a lot of helpful tips on how to take better care of our house so that this would never happen again.
They also found that our fascia boards were in bad shape and that we needed gutter repair, but they didn’t press us with a hard sell to do that work.
Needless to say, we were really impressed.
We ended up having the gutter and fascia repair done and we signed up for a service plan.
We still had other work to do in order to get the inside of our home and basement back in good shape, but it felt good knowing that someone had our back. Oh, and good news — the foundation wasn’t cracked — but things could have been much worse.
So, if you haven’t had your gutters cleaned in a while — food for thought — an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
-Cecelia
