A View From Above

Yeah, so last week I went way up high on a ladder, right alongside Bill on another ladder, to help him replace the rotting boards behind the gutter on the back of our house.

After spending the first trip up hugging the ladder with arms, legs, and brain power, (except that I needed one OR BOTH hands free at times to hold the board in place, so I just had to use brain power and hug the rungs with my toes), I began to relax a bit, by fractions of degrees.

But before all that, Bill had to take down the gutter - it's all one piece - something like 24 feet long or 30 or something. He didn't want to ask for help, so he figured out a way to do it solo. He removed all the nails/screws from the middle part of the gutter first, then looped some heavy duty twine around one end of it, climbed up on top of the roof, looped the twine around the little chimney thing (for releasing noxious gases from the sewer line, apparently) and then removed the nails/screws from that end and oh-so-slowly lowered that part of the gutter to rest against the deck rail.

I unlooped the end, tossed the twine up, and he repeated this with the other end. And - yay! Gutter down, nothing broken, and time to remove the bad fascia board or whatever it's called that was behind the gutter.

Here are some exciting scenes:

So that was...I don't know. One day last week. After taking the gutter off, we put it in the driveway and Bill cleaned it out. Then he took the new boards he'd bought and primed them on both sides.

Then the next day he took the rotting boards down.

And then he summoned me to my doom.

Okay, no doom, I'm still writing.

Anyway, my job was to hold each board in place while Bill screwed it to the house.

After one board was up, we moved over and put up the next (these were 8' boards), and so on. So, after the first board, I decided that I needed to bring my camera up, just to prove I'd been way up there. I also had Julia take a picture of us from the ground, but that's on the other computer, so I'll (maybe) add it to the site later, after I've photoshopped myself to look more attractive from behind and below. Don't hold your breath.

Anyway, these next pictures are the ones I took from way up on the ladder.

This first one is the view if you stick your head through the rungs and look straight down.

Here's a view of the area we are covering with the boards.

And there's Bill, being manly.

Here's the view as I twist precariously to the right and look down. Pardon the mess.

And here's, well, it took me a minute to figure it out just now. I angled the camera through the rungs and down so that I got a picture (why???) of my shirt and shorts billowing through the rungs, and you can see my toes (with the light green nail polish) about dead center in the shot. And then below all that is the deck, a chair, a table, other stuff. I know. It's a bizarre view.

Here's just a shot of the ladders against the house. From the ground. Hi Alex!