The house, measured
A typical Lakewood double is two full floors plus a finished attic with dormers, on a lot around 40 feet wide. The porch roof puts a low gutter at about 10 feet. The main roof puts the real gutter somewhere between 25 and 30 feet up, and along the side of the house that gutter runs over the shared driveway, with the neighbor’s wall six to eight feet away.
That side is the whole problem. The front gutter is reachable from the porch roof if you are steady and the porch roof is sound. The rear gutter is often reachable from the yard with a long ladder. The driveway side is the one that fills worst, because the two roofs funnel leaves into the gap between the houses, and it is the one with nowhere to set a ladder properly.
What the porch roof gives you
Most homeowners who clean their own double do it from the porch roof. You go out a second-floor window onto the porch roof, and from there the front gutter of the main roof is above your head, reachable with a short stepladder or a scoop on a pole.
Three things to know before you do it. The porch roof is a low-pitch roof with rolled roofing or old shingles, slick when wet and worse when covered in maple leaves. The front gutter is the shortest and cleanest run on the house; you will feel finished and you will be a quarter done. And you are 12 feet up on a surface that was not built to be walked on by someone reaching upward. It is the most common way a homeowner gets hurt on a double, and it is the easy part.
What the ground tools actually do
The gutter-cleaning attachments for leaf blowers, pressure washers, and shop vacs all work by getting a nozzle over the gutter from a pole. On a one-story bungalow, they work. On a double, the main gutter is 28 feet up, and the longest sensible pole reaches about 20. What you can reach is the porch gutter, which is not where the problem is.
Even on the runs you can reach, ground tools move the loose top layer and leave the wet mat at the bottom. The mat is what plugs the downspout. A blower from below also cannot tell you the hanger is loose or the corner is leaking, which is half of what a cleaning is for.
The ladder question
An extension ladder that safely reaches a 28-foot gutter is a 32-footer, and it weighs more than most people expect to carry through a side yard. It has to sit on a level base, which on the driveway side of a double means on the concrete of a drive that slopes toward the street, and it has to lean against the gutter or the fascia with a standoff so it does not crush the gutter it is there to clean. At the top, you are working with one hand while the other holds the ladder, over your neighbor’s car.
People do it. Crews do it every day, with a standoff, a second person, and the habit of doing it every day. A homeowner who does it once a year in November, on a wet driveway, is taking the biggest risk of the year to save what a cleaning costs.
A split that makes sense
Plenty of Lakewood homeowners keep the porch gutter and the low bay-window gutter on their own list and hire the height. That is a reasonable line. The porch gutter fills first and fills fastest, it is reachable from a stepladder on the walk, and clearing it between professional cleanings keeps the porch steps from icing.
The main roof, the driveway side, and the downspout flush that finds the plug you cannot see belong to someone with the 32-footer and the standoff. The cost page prices a double as a double, both units and both downspout systems, so you know what you are hiring before you decide.
If you get up there and find the gutter sagging away from the house or a downspout that will not clear, stop cleaning and read the repair page. Cleaning a gutter that has lost its hangers is how a full gutter becomes a gutter on the lawn.