i hate ivy, part 2.

There's a very good reason that I pay someone to mow my yard - because after just 20 minutes of dealing with this...

...I'm sneezing almost constantly and my eyes won't stop watering.

But, I knew I had to deal with this ivy, and if that meant I was spending just a few minutes at a time, so be it. I figured it would take me about three weeks.

Until I walked outside yesterday afternoon to get started, and saw this:

Can you see it? Here's another view, from the other side, which is when I actually noticed it:

The gutter, that was just hanging on the wall, had fallen, knocking off the strap that kept the vent attached at the top. It also exposed this nice crack in the brick. Of course, I didn't even know what this thing was, but figured it probably wasn't good to have it like that, so I did was I usually do when I have a question about my house. I called Victor.

He was on his way out anyway, so he showed up a few minutes later and said we needed to get that reattached. He went back home to get his ladder and electric screwdriver, then came back 20 minutes with all of that, plus a chainsaw, machete, and lopper (which looks like this).

Which was a huge improvement over the tool I had been working with:

(image from the Home Depot) 

In a few minutes, he had cleared out every bush and tree except the azaleas, and then he climbed up on his ladder to pull the rest of the gutters off the house.

Within a couple of hours, the side of my house that used to look like this:

Now looks like this:

And this:

Looks like this:

And thanks to Victor and his power tools, it all happened much faster than I expected.