With some awesome spring weather these past couple of weeks, I’ve been taking the opportunity to do some much needed work on the outside of Our New Old House. One task I have to accomplish is to remove the broken old gutters and rotten fascia boards so we can hire someone to put on shiny new gutters for us.

Well, many of you have seen exterior pictures of our house and have probably noted, as have I, that the gutters look like they’re ready to fall off the house with a strong breeze. Unfortunately for me, that’s just not the case. Looks can be deceiving, and after forty five minutes of probably looking as dumb as the Keystone Cops, I called my buddy Matt, who works for a company that does metal fabrication and stuff. He talked me down from my frustrated haze, convinced me that it was not a good idea to take power saws up a ladder, and reassured me that I probably don’t weigh as much as a foot of snow. Matt’s cool like that. In the course of our discussion, he came up with the idea that I may need to cut the nails that are holding the gutters onto the house. “Brilliant!” I announced in true Jib-Jab fashion. However, there’s a little tube surrounding each nail and I can’t get to the nail with a hack saw without removing it.

That’s when Matt told me that those are called ferrules and that an interesting thing about ferrules is that in prisons when they have things like sewer tunnels going out of the building, they put bars across them and put ferrules around the bars so that when you try to saw through the bars, the ferrules just spin and you can’t get the saw to grip.

Matt’s full of awesome information like that.

So I had to get these ferrules off before I could saw through the nails.

Here’s me braving my fear of ladders. (Ok, I’m not actually scared of ladders, I’m just not very comfortable on them. Don’t mock me. )

I found a screw driver worked pretty well to loosen the ferrules and pop them off.

Then I was able to saw through the nails with a hack saw.

I pushed the gutter off the nails with a prybar. Didn’t take pictures from that point on because I was just too darn pooped. But I will tell you it made an awesome crash when it hit the ground!

And here’s one more picture of me being awesome on the ladder:

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