For my New Year's resolution, I promise to keep the gutters on my house clean.

One time I nearly fell off the ladder, and my wife made me promise not to climb up there and do it myself ever again.

But I really hate to pay what it costs to have somebody else do the dirty work, so I am caught between a rock and a hard place.

It's almost not worth owning the house just because of the gutter problem.

I know that these "gutter dome" things are supposed to solve the problem.

But they cost too much and I am not sure I really believe they work.

I saw one of these "wonder-gutters" in operation one time at the old Southeastern Fair, but it was right next to the guy selling the "wonder blender" that converts leftovers and grass clippings into a healthy strawberry milkshake, so I am understandably suspicious.

Furthermore, it seems somehow less than manly to pay for some contraption that would solve an age-old problem so easily.

And exactly what happens to the leaves and pine straw when they slide down the roof and hit the wonder gutter?

Do they dissolve in the rush of water? Are they ground up into some sort of ecologically unsanitary rain mulch?

And what about all the neighborhood kids who depend on cleaning out gutters to generate funds for their first date or baseball glove?

When a young man I know was a teenager, he agreed to clean all the gutters on my house for $10.

That sounded fair to me, and since I have particularly high and large gutters, I thought it would be fun to watch him do all this work for $10. In fact, it was worth $10 just to watch.

At one point, he had the aluminum ladder within 2 feet of the big black wires bringing electricity from the pole to my house.

In a nod to OSHA, I urged him to be careful but also to not miss any leaves just because they were near the wires.

Later, after he almost fell off the ladder, he decided to go up to $15. And now that he's married, he won't do gutters anymore. As a result, mine have not been cleaned in several years.

If the truth be told, the gutters along the back of the house rusted out, and so I had all of them removed a couple of years ago.

The guy who took them down wanted to dump the impacted leaves in my back yard, but I reminded him that removing the gutter's contents was traditionally part of a comprehensive gutter removal job.

Having no gutters on the back of the house has solved the leaf problem, but now my basement floods almost every time it rains. Which is OK because we have a drain in the floor of the basement.

My wife has complained bitterly about the clay-colored river from the foundation to the drain, but then I ask her if she would rather I climb up on the ladder and fall off.

She says I have her on that one. Then I change the subject.

We also had to replace the roof, which turned out to be a several-year project, and of course it was not prudent to replace the gutters before you were going to have a new roof put on. So I was able to postpone again.

But now the new roof is on and the trim has been painted, and it's getting harder and harder to put it off.

Another question I have about gutters may be meaningful only to those of us who are veteran gutter cleaners, which I am guessing may not be many of you.

Have you ever noticed, when you are cleaning out the inch-thick layer of dirt in the bottom of a gutter, that there are earthworms happily burrowing, eating, having worm families or whatever earthworms do, right there in the gutters attached to your roof?

How on earth did the first earthworm make it all the way up the water spout and set up an earthworm outpost 12 feet above the ground?

I suppose it's possible that someone had gutters so completely clogged that the water spouts had become solidly filled with dirt instead of leaves, and the worm just tunneled all the way up.

In any case, my wife keeps asking when we are going to get gutters on the back of the house, and I have put her off for the last couple of years, but I am afraid it won't work anymore.

So here goes:

I resolve to put up gutters, and I resolve to find a neighborhood kid willing to clean all the gutters on my house for $15 or less.

There! That's my real estate related New Year's resolution, and I'm sticking to it.

Happy New Year!

John Adams is a broker and investor. He is host of the "John Adams Radio Show," a call-in program dealing with homeownership and real estate, from 1 to 3 p.m. Saturdays on NewsRadio 640 (WGST). For more real estate information or to make a comment, visit www.money99.com.