What's beyond OCD?

The crew who painted the fence noticed that the tile roof on my house was looking pretty grungy, maybe even fungus growing up there. They offered to power-wash the roof for a pretty good price, so I said go ahead and do it.

Big mistake.

The Spanish tiles on the roof now look clean and they are back to their original color, but.....

After the paint crew left on Thursday, I started getting whiffs of a foul odor. So Friday morning I climbed a ladder to take a closer look. Talk about unintended consequences. The rain gutters were loaded with a foul-smelling reddish color muck anywhere from one-half inch to 2 inches deep and all the downspouts were completely clogged. I also noticed the rain gutters were sagging down as if they were about to fall off.

So I spent all Saturday morning up on the ladder with a garden trowel scooping this foul-smelling crap out of the rain gutters. After getting all I could get with the trowel, I got out the garden hose and sprayed the gutters clean (the downspouts were unplugged by now). I was using a five gallon bucket and removed from the gutters enough of the muck to fill that bucket three times.

Apparently, the weight of that stuff had almost pulled the rain gutters away from thier mounts on the facia board around the roof. I also repaired all of the gutter mounts and put up some metal brackets to add some extra support for the gutters.

So what was this foul-smelling muck? Ash from the two big wildfires that we experienced here in the county in 2002 and 2007.

The consequence of cleaning out the remaining muck with the garden hose is that everything within 10 feet of the house, all the way around, was coated with with the reddish brown dust mixed with water. The hot sun quickly dried it and it became almost permanently attached to whatever it was on.

Sunday morning was spent with a bucket of soapy water and the garden hose washing and rinsing off everything that got covered with that stuff. How fun!

I think I am just going to stay in bed until we leave on this trip.