Ned Stevens Gutter Cleaning

Ned Stevens Gutter Cleaning, based in Winchester, works gutters across the Boston area — cleaning, repairing, installing, with power washing and window jobs mixed in. Its Massachusetts home improvement contractor license is active, and its Google page carries 4.5 stars across 1,670 ratings, but that number tells only part of the story. Read enough of the recent reviews and a split personality shows up. On one side: crews that clear a season's worth of leaves out of every elbow and downspout and leave the yard looking untouched — the kind of job that gets a homeowner to write "thorough" and "neat" without being asked. When two gutters tore off a house in a wind storm, the company called back within minutes and had a technician, Alfredo, out in two days to repair the fascia board and reset the gutters. A new install on an older house with awkward rooflines came out clean enough that the homeowner named the two installers, Isaac and Marino, directly. On the other side, several recent reviewers describe the same pattern after a routine cleaning: a wave of calls and emails pushing more services, then a crew showing up to do work nobody asked for. One customer says a one-time cleaning turned into an unexplained roughly $500 charge that kept recurring on autopay; another describes "relentless" calls pushing a full gutter replacement. A third reports a spring cleaning that arrived months late, was handled by a crew with no shared language, and by the debris still visible up top, wasn't finished. This isn't rare enough to dismiss — 18 of the last 74 reviews run negative — and it lines up with what BBB shows independently: a D+ grade and 10 complaints on file, even as BBB and Google read the reputation very differently from each other. Before booking, ask exactly what a yearly service plan commits you to and how billing works if you don't renew — the autopay complaints all trace back to plans, not one-off jobs. It's worth asking whether the crew will confirm an arrival window in advance, since a same-morning text is the norm and more than one customer felt blindsided by it. One buyer of gutter guards found the mesh gave out under snow and ice within two years and had to pay again to replace it — worth raising if guards are part of the quote. For a straightforward, one-time gutter cleaning or repair, the work most reviewers describe holds up — crews move efficiently and clean up after themselves. Anyone signing up for a recurring service plan should get the cancellation and rebilling terms in writing before the first visit, not after the first unexpected charge.