Gutter cleaning company Grand Gutters calls Plymouth home throughout the year, but last February the company set up camp 1,400 miles east, in Boston. Grand Gutters was there to help steam away the city’s extreme ice dam problem.
John Theis, owner of Grand Gutters, had been reading various news articles about the issue. His company specializes in ice dam removal during the winter, but had been finding it hard to get work in an unseasonably mild winter.
Theis rounded up eight employees and three trucks of equipment, initially hoping to get five or six days of work; they stayed three weeks.
“The ice dams were huge,” Theis says. “Typically [to remove a dam] it takes us two to three hours—out there, the longest was nine hours.”
Business was slow at first, but once word got out, the crew was getting calls on a regular basis. “I was worried about reception,” Theis says. “[People on the East Coast] come across differently than we’re used to in Minnesota, but surprisingly they were very happy to see us! People were really nice.”
The crew found that each roof took longer to clear than typical Minnesota roofs, partly because of a lack of knowledge about ice dams and snow procedures. “Most people didn’t shovel walkways. We had to park out in the road and run 250 feet of hose through 10 feet of snow. Sometimes it took us about 45 minutes to just get things set up,” Theis says.
This summer, the crew welcomes a respite after a season of hard, icy work, returning to installing and cleaning gutters around the Twin Cities with the same dedication that made them such a welcome Minnesota presence on the East Coast. 4240 Merrimac Lane; 612.759.8873.
