Battle Ground window cleaning business owner offers free gutter cleaning for elderly, disabled and anyone in need
VANCOUVER — Doru “Dee” Giuchici loves cleaning windows.
He loves it so much he and his wife Lavinia founded their own company, Fine Touch Window Cleaning, in Battle Ground. He also cleans gutters, and this time of year has his work cut out for him.
After noticing a need for gutter cleaning among elderly, disabled and low-income people, he decided to make a decision from conviction: free gutter cleaning to anyone who is in need. No strings attached. No fine print. Just genuine service.
“I decided to just put up a kind of a way to give back to the community and ensure that accidents don’t happen,” Dee said. “Especially because of something I could have done and could have prevented and once I started doing it, it actually felt so good doing it that I kept wanting to expand and I kept wanting to have more people contact me to do it.”
Dee has been doing window and gutter cleaning off-and-on for the last few years. After returning from living in his homeland of Romania for three years a year ago, he began expanding his business in Battle Ground and Clark County.
Armed with ladders of all sizes, specialty hand tools for clearing clogged gutters and a unique, heavy-duty gutter vacuum, he clears gutters in record times, often in the rain and cold.
“For the first time since I have lived here, which is three years, the water actually drains down the pipe,” said Ronna Jakobitz of Battle Ground. “It doesn’t splash on the porch or you know, overflow the gutters. It’s absolutely wonderful. He did a great job.”
Jakobitz, now 72, was saving up to pay for professional gutter cleaning done at her house when she saw Dee’s Facebook post for Fine Touch Window Cleaning’s free gutter service. She describes the service as a great blessing.
“It was just hard to believe that a small business owner would spend their time doing things like this for the community,” she said. “To have them volunteer and give back to the community like this, it’s wonderful. This was like a wonderful Christmas present.”
Dee plans to offer the free service in addition to all his normal for-profit services, including window cleaning and pressure washing, for as long as he is able. Each year, the idea is to offer the service from October through February. After March, Dee says he will get to any people on his waiting list that they couldn’t do before then.
He and his employee work on houses of all sizes, as well as commercial buildings. They are certified through licensing and insurance that meet all Washington state standards.
“I decided to just make it a bigger program because I kept having it run through my mind that ‘What if someone calls me and they want their gutters cleaned?’” Dee said. “And I tell them, ‘You know, no, I can’t do it for that price.’ And then God forbid they have an accident and then I hear about it, I wouldn’t be able to live with myself for the rest of my life.”
In 2011, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that 43 percent of fatal falls involved a ladder. Dee said he is well aware of how many ER visits involve ladder falls, and considers this a key motivation in his free gutter service.
So far, Dee has completed the service for around a dozen people in Battle Ground and Vancouver. He says he hopes to average two to three a week, and sign others up on the waiting list.
“This is just a wonderful thing that he’s doing,” said Nancy Montgomery of Vancouver. “And there’s so many things that people like, not necessarily my age, but my abilities, I can’t do anymore and so he’s doing something for me that I can’t do. He wasn’t pressuring me to do anything, you know, he just wanted to come out and clean the gutters.”
Dee explained, while tirelessly working to clean Montgomery’s gutters, that he sees doing something like this as a part of who we as people were designed to be.
“I see it as a way of setting an example for the future generations, for the current generation as something that seems you know, like ‘Hey, that’s that’s kind of cool. You know, I might want to do that too. I’ll try it out,’” he said. “My wife was fully on board with this. It takes time away from her and I’m doing work that’s for free, but she’s so happy for me to do that, that she actually gives me a bigger hug than when I come back with a paycheck because it’s giving back to the community.”
To get in touch with Dee about the Free Gutter Cleaning Initiative, call (360) 513-3603 or send a message via Facebook. You can also email Dee at info@finetouchwc.com.
