guttering

[Fred]

Hi,

What's the best (safest) way to replace guttering? Had a quote from a pro for £200 labour and £100ish parts. Does that seem reasonable? I wondered whether for £200 I could hire some scaffolding/a cherry picker and do it myself? I don't think I would feel comfortable at the top of a ladder "hands free".

Thanks.

[Andrew Gabriel]

Last lot I did, I had scaffolding. I was however also repairing the roof and needed to pile up the tiles, and replacing and painting the facias. I would say the scaffolding made it all so easy, and safe compared to a ladder, that I would consider using it again even for simpler tasks such as just doing gutters and facias. (No point doing gutters without painting or if necessary replacing facias IMO.) Scaffolding was £300 for a 5m long wall up to just below the first floor gutter line, but cantilevered over a porch and ground floor bay window roof which I didn't want them to put any weight on. Might even find cost of that sort of thing drops in the current building climate.

[Phil L]

You could probably do it youself for that, but why bother? - he's doing it for that and *you* don't have to get covered in rotted leaves and put yourself in danger into the bargain.

I normally charge approx £300 per elevation, IE mid terrace = £600, semi = £900 and detatched = £1200

[stuart noble]

Essentially a 2 blokes/2 ladders operation I would have thought

[Roger]

The message from stuart noble contains these words:

Why bother with diy at all. Just leave it to the professionals and spend your spare time watching your bank balance diminish. :-)

Some of us don't have £1200 to spare for such a simple task, some of us that do just prefer to keep savings for essential work we can't do ourselves and some of us are just workaholics. Hmm, I seem to fit into all three categories.

I replaced half the guttering on my house and put up guttering on my barn last summer working on my own from a ladder. About 100 feet of plastic in total. I didn't find it much of a problem although I have since bought a stand-off to make doing the final section a bit easier. Previous guttering was wooden and replacing wood with wood would have been more difficult on account of the weight, but probably much quicker. However I expect the plastic to last longer than the wood did.