Gutter Cleaning & Brightening

Two jobs that get confused

Clearing a gutter means getting the debris out so water can leave your roof. Brightening a gutter means taking the black striping off the front so it stops making a clean house look dirty. They are different problems, they need different work, and bundling them into one vague price is how homeowners end up disappointed.

Clearing

Debris comes out by hand and goes into a bag, not onto your beds. Every downspout is flushed and watched until it runs clear — a blocked downspout is the actual cause of most overflow, and it will not show up in a photo of a tidy gutter. While we are up there we check for loose spikes, sagging runs, separated seams and any pitch that is sending water the wrong way, and we send you pictures of anything worth knowing about.

What a clogged gutter costs if it is ignored: water over the front edge onto fascia and soffit, water down the wall behind the siding, water pooling at the foundation, and ice damming in winter that pushes meltwater back up under the shingles.

Brightening

Tiger stripes are the gutter’s own painted finish oxidizing, mixed with everything that runs off the roof, bonded on hard over years. Because it is chemically bound rather than sitting on top, a soft wash rinses straight over it. Removal means a purpose-made gutter brightener, dwell time, and physical agitation along every foot of gutter face — which is slow, and which is why it is priced by the linear foot.

The payoff is that it is the most visible improvement per dollar on the whole house. Clean siding with striped gutters still reads as a dirty house from the street. Clean both and the difference is obvious from three doors down.

Best booked together

Gutter work pairs naturally with a house wash — the gutter faces are already reachable, the runoff lands on surfaces we are cleaning anyway, and doing both on one visit costs less than two trips.