Gutter Cleaning for Ladysmith Homes and Main Street

Ladysmith has had a Nanaimo connection from the start. James Dunsmuir founded it as a coal town to house the families of miners working the pits around Nanaimo, and many of its first buildings were moved in from Extension and Wellington around 1898, by rail and by oxen. Today it is a short run south of the city on Highway 1, which goes straight through town rather than around it, and it sits well inside our service area.

Houses with a long history of patching

A town that began with buildings carried in from elsewhere, and then kept growing for more than a century, ends up with plenty of roofs that were never planned as one piece. On older houses it is common to find two or three gutter profiles on the same building: the original run, a section added with a back extension, and a replacement piece that was the closest match the store had at the time.

Each change of profile means a joint, and joints are where gutters start to drip. Our routine on these houses is to empty every section by hand, flush it, and stand where we can see the joints while the water runs through. A slow drip is usually a reseal. A section that has pulled off the fascia, or a run that holds water because it has lost its fall, is a gutter repair job, and we will describe exactly what it needs before any work starts.

Streets that let you see your own gutter

Ladysmith is built on a hillside above a sheltered harbour, and many of its streets still carry names from the Second Boer War: Roberts, French, Buller, Warren, Kitchener, Baden-Powell. The slope has one advantage for a homeowner. From the street above your house, you can often look down into your own trough. If you can see green in it, or a row of seedlings along the front edge, it has been too long.

The same slope means the downhill wall of many houses is a full storey taller than the uphill one. We bring ladders long enough for the tall side.

First Avenue and the false fronts

First Avenue was named the best street in Canada by the Canadian Institute of Planners in 2017, and it still has wood-framed, false-front buildings from around 1900. A false front is built to hide the roof from the street. It hides the gutters and drains behind it just as well, so a blockage at the back of an old commercial building can go unseen until water shows up on a ceiling inside.

If you own or lease one of these buildings, have someone look along the lane side and the roof edge behind the parapet at least once a year. We clean commercial gutters as well as residential ones, and we tell you what we see up there.

Homes on the forest side of town

Ladysmith keeps more than 26 km of trails, and the longest of them, Holland Creek, Heart Lake and Stocking Lake, run through forest on the inland side of town. Houses on that side sit closer to tall Douglas fir and western red cedar. Their gutters fill with fine needles that pack down rather than float, so a spring clean as well as a fall one is worth considering, and so are gutter guards. Houses nearer the harbour with fewer big conifers around them can often manage with one visit a year.

What to send us

The address, the number of storeys, and anything awkward about getting to the back of the house. We reply with a free quote, we work weekdays, and every bag of debris leaves with us.