Author Topic: Gutters and Fixing siding/roofing  (Read 1736 times)

jeromedawg

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Gutters and Fixing siding/roofing
« on: January 12, 2022, 11:46:12 AM »
Hi all,

Wanted to get some feedback on the order of repairs when we have some areas of stucco behind/under the existing gutters that we know are deteriorating. The roofer is saying to expect some damage behind the gutters and that he can help with waterproofing/sealing off the transition points between the siding and roof edge. We are likely going to replace our gutters - currently we have 5" and will prob just replace with 5" with some downspout reconfiguration. A few other companies who have come out to quote have all been suggesting 6" gutters but the last guy who gave me a quote for 5" was saying he really doesn't think 6" is necessary in our situation. Obviously it's lower cost going with 5" and I've heard some of the pros and cons (6" can hold more water and carry away more of it + debris, etc. On the flipside, they can also hold more water and put more stress on your siding, etc). Not sure what to make of all that but I'm planning on collecting one more quote before deciding. That said, if there are issues with the siding and roofing that need to be corrected, how should I best coordinate this with the roofer and gutter company? Should I have the gutter company come out to remove the gutters and line my roofer up to do the repairs ASAP right after before having the new gutters put back up? I asked my roofer and he said to just have the new gutters installed and he would work around whatever they do. My concern is if there's damage to actual siding that needs to be corrected. Last thing I'd want is to have the roofer or some other contractor removing and or messing with the new gutters to do their repairs. Seems cleaner to have the gutters removed, do any repairs, and get the new ones back up but I know that can also be a logistics issue too (I figure the gutter company would want to knock out their work in one day versus having to make two trips out). Have any of you had to deal with both these kinds of issues? And what was the order/steps taken for the removal, repairs and installation?

Sibley

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Re: Gutters and Fixing siding/roofing
« Reply #1 on: January 12, 2022, 12:27:14 PM »
The roofers dented my gutters by accident. So, maybe top down? Roof, gutter, siding? And the gutter people fix the fascia as needed when they do the gutters.

Unless siding and gutters are the same contractor, so they can do both. I would try for that actually. Roofers, depends on the contractor.

jeromedawg

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Re: Gutters and Fixing siding/roofing
« Reply #2 on: January 12, 2022, 12:31:08 PM »
The roofers dented my gutters by accident. So, maybe top down? Roof, gutter, siding? And the gutter people fix the fascia as needed when they do the gutters.

Unless siding and gutters are the same contractor, so they can do both. I would try for that actually. Roofers, depends on the contractor.

The next company I'm having out does roofing AND gutters apparently, so I plan on getting their take on it too.

Our roofer seemed to be telling us to deal with the gutters first - it sounds like a catch-22 because he won't know what's wrong until the gutters are removed. I hate this "pass-the-buck" game between contractors but I guess it's the nature of things.

BlueMR2

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Re: Gutters and Fixing siding/roofing
« Reply #3 on: January 12, 2022, 05:18:10 PM »
If you have a do it all shop come out, the order they're going to do things will most likely look like this:

- Remove gutters
- Roof
- Siding
- Replace gutters

sonofsven

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Re: Gutters and Fixing siding/roofing
« Reply #4 on: January 12, 2022, 08:34:36 PM »
If you have a do it all shop come out, the order they're going to do things will most likely look like this:

- Remove gutters
- Roof
- Siding
- Replace gutters

Yes that.

jeromedawg

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Re: Gutters and Fixing siding/roofing
« Reply #5 on: January 13, 2022, 07:40:33 AM »
If you have a do it all shop come out, the order they're going to do things will most likely look like this:

- Remove gutters
- Roof
- Siding
- Replace gutters

It sounds like this is the most ideal way to do it. I asked our roofer again and he said just have them replace the gutters and they'll do the fixes after but I'd be wary of that per Sibley's experience. It's tough finding companies that do both. I've only come across two so far and one had to back out on their scheduled estimate due to the entire office being exposed to COVID :(

BudgetSlasher

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Re: Gutters and Fixing siding/roofing
« Reply #6 on: January 13, 2022, 12:53:20 PM »
The roofers dented my gutters by accident. So, maybe top down? Roof, gutter, siding? And the gutter people fix the fascia as needed when they do the gutters.

Unless siding and gutters are the same contractor, so they can do both. I would try for that actually. Roofers, depends on the contractor.

The next company I'm having out does roofing AND gutters apparently, so I plan on getting their take on it too.

Our roofer seemed to be telling us to deal with the gutters first - it sounds like a catch-22 because he won't know what's wrong until the gutters are removed. I hate this "pass-the-buck" game between contractors but I guess it's the nature of things.

My experience is that it is not just between contractors. I've had multiple contractors on multiple projects do the "only quote what we can see".

An example, we had a flashing failure where our deck is attached to our house. We had several contractors out and all would only quote what they could see while noting that once they start work they might find more. What they could see was fix the flashing and replace the sheathing, but I knew and I suspect every one of them knew the entire wall below, including framing, would have to be replaced (that's why I decided to hire it out). Sure enough the second they opened the wall I get a call at work that is was "worse than the quote".

yachi

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Re: Gutters and Fixing siding/roofing
« Reply #7 on: January 13, 2022, 12:58:56 PM »
If you have a do it all shop come out, the order they're going to do things will most likely look like this:

- Remove gutters
- Roof
- Siding
- Replace gutters

It sounds like this is the most ideal way to do it. I asked our roofer again and he said just have them replace the gutters and they'll do the fixes after but I'd be wary of that per Sibley's experience. It's tough finding companies that do both. I've only come across two so far and one had to back out on their scheduled estimate due to the entire office being exposed to COVID :(

If you aren't trying to save and preserve your existing gutters, and are getting *new* gutters anyway, I think you should have whoever needs access behind them do the removal.  A roofer is more than capable of removing gutters.  So is a siding guy.

lthenderson

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Re: Gutters and Fixing siding/roofing
« Reply #8 on: January 14, 2022, 06:51:17 AM »
Three years ago I had my entire roof redone with the existing gutters in place. After they finished the roof, I had the gutters completely replaced all in one short day by a different contractor.  If the siding people say they can work around them, I would take them at their word and have my roof done first, followed by gutters and then the siding.

But the caveat is that I live in an area where everyone has basements and no gutters equals a wet basement which is no bueno when most of it is finished. I haven't seen you mention a basement in your other posts and if your house is on a slab, you could probably get away with no gutters for a time without much damage to the siding.

jeromedawg

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Re: Gutters and Fixing siding/roofing
« Reply #9 on: January 14, 2022, 10:38:16 AM »
Three years ago I had my entire roof redone with the existing gutters in place. After they finished the roof, I had the gutters completely replaced all in one short day by a different contractor.  If the siding people say they can work around them, I would take them at their word and have my roof done first, followed by gutters and then the siding.

But the caveat is that I live in an area where everyone has basements and no gutters equals a wet basement which is no bueno when most of it is finished. I haven't seen you mention a basement in your other posts and if your house is on a slab, you could probably get away with no gutters for a time without much damage to the siding.

No basement here - the concern though is having water spill over the sides of the roof and into parts of our hard that shouldn't have water - if we get another heavy rain and I don't have gutters in place, very likely we'll see flooding. Especially with our place not landscaped and exposed dirt up against the house. The last heavy rain we had it was a complete nightmare - there was literally a moat around the side of our house

If you have a do it all shop come out, the order they're going to do things will most likely look like this:

- Remove gutters
- Roof
- Siding
- Replace gutters

It sounds like this is the most ideal way to do it. I asked our roofer again and he said just have them replace the gutters and they'll do the fixes after but I'd be wary of that per Sibley's experience. It's tough finding companies that do both. I've only come across two so far and one had to back out on their scheduled estimate due to the entire office being exposed to COVID :(

If you aren't trying to save and preserve your existing gutters, and are getting *new* gutters anyway, I think you should have whoever needs access behind them do the removal.  A roofer is more than capable of removing gutters.  So is a siding guy.

Good point - I'll ask my roofer but he seemed a bit 'unwilling' to mess with the gutters and kept bouncing it back to having the gutter company do the work. He's a pretty good roofer (supposedly our neighbor used him and he was the only roofer they could find who resolved a leak in their roof after going through several roofers, and so the previous owners had him do work on the roof here and the info was just passed down to us) but he's a bit flakey - part of it is that he's not local to the area and he has been slammed busy especially after the wet weather. Even before that though, he hardly ever shows up when he says he will and ends up pushing it back by a week. So we might need to look around for another roofer who is a little better with that...

jeromedawg

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Re: Gutters and Fixing siding/roofing
« Reply #10 on: January 18, 2022, 04:37:34 PM »
BTW: wanted to get some feedback/opinions to form a consensus on downspout placement/additions.

Currently we have this (gutters in yellow and downspouts in red if it wasn't obvious haha):




Now, I've heard multiple opinions from every gutter person who has come out on how they would do it and almost everyone of them would do it differently than the other. The last guy I spoke with was saying to add a additional downspout in the front and he would change up some of the redirects/connections basically to connect the two gutters in the middle to each other and have both exiting to a downspout between them. He also said he would add one in the back on the other side. All but one of them have said to use 6" gutters for the pitch that our roof has. It's about 50/50 as far as adding an extra downspout in the back as well as adding an extra downspout in the front versus just updating everything to route better with the existing downspout placement. The reason the last guy said to add the extra downspouts though is to alleviate the gutters so you don't have them holding large amounts of water (which logically makes sense if we're already saying that 6" gutters can hold more water and WHEN/IF that actually happens there will be more stress on the anchor points and system)

lthenderson

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Re: Gutters and Fixing siding/roofing
« Reply #11 on: January 19, 2022, 09:07:02 AM »
Not sure which is the back or the front but in the lower picture, I would definitely add another downspout on the right side to alleviate some of the weight of the water, especially on a tile roof where the water will runoff quickly in a heavy rain. I would probably upgrade to 6 inch gutters as that seems to be the new normal these days and you have more options when it comes to gutter covers than you probably would with 5 inch. The locations of the downspouts in the top picture looks okay to me.

jeromedawg

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Re: Gutters and Fixing siding/roofing
« Reply #12 on: January 19, 2022, 11:09:14 AM »
Not sure which is the back or the front but in the lower picture, I would definitely add another downspout on the right side to alleviate some of the weight of the water, especially on a tile roof where the water will runoff quickly in a heavy rain. I would probably upgrade to 6 inch gutters as that seems to be the new normal these days and you have more options when it comes to gutter covers than you probably would with 5 inch. The locations of the downspouts in the top picture looks okay to me.

Thanks. The first pic is the front and the second pic is the back of the home. So we'll add a second downspout in the back. I'm just not sure where to have the water exit at the moment since the concrete alley on that side isn't graded properly and water pools there. Dumping the water there would be a no-no. We may set it up to drain into the area that is currently the lawn. I intend to have a dry river bed or french drain running along there so would probably look to tie the downspout in somehow.

The front area there's actually a leak inside the house approximately where the bigger orange circle/oval is. We are *suspecting* that it's originating from the smaller orange circled area - I put the GoPro up there and it looks like in this area they butted the gutter cap against the wall and stucco'ed around it. Additionally, I saw some water *pooled* in that area. It almost seems like the gutter isn't sloped correctly so water is collecting there. If we're seeing a wet spot inside the kids' room which is at the base of the wall close to but not directly in the corner of their room, logically, it seems like the water is coming in from that area of the gutter. The stucco/wall exterior there is probably saturated :(



Anyway, we're going to have to coordinate with our stucco repair guy to patch that up as well as patching the red circled area, which it seems is problematic due to how they connected the smaller upper section of gutter to the lower longer section on the left hand side of the front of the house - I think it's a piece of downspout and they covered it back up with the rakes. The last project mgr who came out said he'd remove that section of downspout completely and tie the upper section of gutter to the lower section to the right of it. He'd also eliminate the downspout connection tying the two right gutters together. This all went back to his thought of adding alleviation points so that no one gutter system is holding too much water.

teachclimb

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Re: Gutters and Fixing siding/roofing
« Reply #13 on: January 19, 2022, 04:33:02 PM »
Another option would be to install 5 inch gutters with commercial downspouts. The commercial spouts are 3x4 vs the standard 2x3. This might eliminate the need for a second downspout. Be sure that you have flashing installed correctly. Tile roofs can sometimes have gaps on the ends, and if they do not have the proper flashing they can leak. There is also a chance the the end caps are not sealed properly (the adhesive wears out over time), which can cause leaking.

jeromedawg

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Re: Gutters and Fixing siding/roofing
« Reply #14 on: January 19, 2022, 05:54:32 PM »
Another option would be to install 5 inch gutters with commercial downspouts. The commercial spouts are 3x4 vs the standard 2x3. This might eliminate the need for a second downspout. Be sure that you have flashing installed correctly. Tile roofs can sometimes have gaps on the ends, and if they do not have the proper flashing they can leak. There is also a chance the the end caps are not sealed properly (the adhesive wears out over time), which can cause leaking.

I'm currently looking at bringing in a company who does roofing AND gutters versus just a company specializing in gutters. I figure the former will be able more definitively to see if there are issues. Not saying a gutter-specific contractor can't but I'd trust a roofer more to look for any potential damage. Interestingly, the first roofing/gutter company that came out has also provided the lowest quote/bid for the job at $1330 and this is for 6" gutters. I was asking the project mgr about 5" and he was saying that due to the pitch of the roof, you really want 6" to capture the water so it's not splashing over the sides. I guess 6" would extend further out and help mitigate that.

Whichever contractor we decide on, I'll ask them to check the flashing as well. The second roofing/gutter company that came out suggested that they first come out to remove the gutters, then we have our stucco guy lined up to patch the problem areas on the exterior wall/siding, then they come back to replace the gutters.

sonofsven

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Re: Gutters and Fixing siding/roofing
« Reply #15 on: January 19, 2022, 08:10:39 PM »
How much does it rain there? Unless you're getting monsoons I think 5" is fine.

jeromedawg

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Re: Gutters and Fixing siding/roofing
« Reply #16 on: January 19, 2022, 08:23:27 PM »
How much does it rain there? Unless you're getting monsoons I think 5" is fine.

Rainy season is typically from December through March give or take. I wouldn't say it rains a ton but when it does that's when everyone finds out about the leaks :) The last time we had rain it was coming down hard along with the wind. These events are rarer but it was bad - we learned the previous owners didn't maintain their gutter system so they were overflowing and just not functioning very well. I'll inquire about how much it would be to put 5" gutters up with larger downspouts but am just waiting for one more quote from the last company that came out. 

EDIT: I asked again about going with 5" gutters and the owner of the first roofing/gutter company that came out said that he thinks 6" is most appropriate based on the combination of the pitch of the roof AND the type of tiles (Spanish clay tile) and how they're hanging over the roof - 6" has a wider mouth to catch the water coming off the tiles versus having it splashing over. That said, I'm really hating the Spanish clay tile roofing - it's just such a PITA to maintain. We've been discovering that our home is actually quite a high maintenance home. Permeable stucco siding and delicate Spanish clay tile roof - all make for a structure that is quite susceptible to water damage. I've seen a few other homes in our tract where the owners changed the roof out completely. Seems like that might be a good option for the long-term... the nice thing is that there's no HOA so we don't have to deal with any of the nonsense and fluff with getting stuff like this approved.
« Last Edit: January 20, 2022, 10:16:49 AM by jeromedawg »

BudgetSlasher

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Re: Gutters and Fixing siding/roofing
« Reply #17 on: January 20, 2022, 10:37:47 AM »
Being under the weather, I just connected all of your threads.

You may already being doing this, but since there are multiple threads I wanted to mention this.

You appear to be dealing with a water management issue ... two really. And it should be treated as two whole problems, roof and yard drainage, rather than in a potentially fragmented/piecemeal (which is the impression, right or wrong, I get seeing posts with a narrow focus).

I would start with the roof and gutters as that may address some issues such as around windows (if water is getting in) or the yard (depending on where it is discharged) and then the yard.

Regarding the yard there is a fellow over on youtube that has been referred to here, I believe the channel is fenech drain man. It might be worth you checking out for yard drainage, he has one episode where in a flat yard he slopes the drain pipes and uses a lift station to move water into a leach field. Perhaps that could be adopted to address your yard without having to regrade and remove/replace concrete.

It sounds like you have mostly abandoned the irrigation system, but if you are using it consider deactivating it. I live in basement territory and I've seen a number of wet basement that magically dried up when a  nearby leaking sprinkler system or water main was repaired/replaced.

jeromedawg

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Re: Gutters and Fixing siding/roofing
« Reply #18 on: January 20, 2022, 11:16:18 AM »
Being under the weather, I just connected all of your threads.

You may already being doing this, but since there are multiple threads I wanted to mention this.

You appear to be dealing with a water management issue ... two really. And it should be treated as two whole problems, roof and yard drainage, rather than in a potentially fragmented/piecemeal (which is the impression, right or wrong, I get seeing posts with a narrow focus).

I would start with the roof and gutters as that may address some issues such as around windows (if water is getting in) or the yard (depending on where it is discharged) and then the yard.

Regarding the yard there is a fellow over on youtube that has been referred to here, I believe the channel is fenech drain man. It might be worth you checking out for yard drainage, he has one episode where in a flat yard he slopes the drain pipes and uses a lift station to move water into a leach field. Perhaps that could be adopted to address your yard without having to regrade and remove/replace concrete.

It sounds like you have mostly abandoned the irrigation system, but if you are using it consider deactivating it. I live in basement territory and I've seen a number of wet basement that magically dried up when a  nearby leaking sprinkler system or water main was repaired/replaced.

Thanks! Yes, we are dealing with water issues. There are actually 3: 1) roofing and or gutters 2) windows 3) yard drainage.

The issue with the windows we're kind of just 'surveying' at the moment. I bought a bunch of polyurethane caulk and sealed around all but one window (on the second floor) that we could access. I'm not confident this will resolve the issues we're seeing but I figure it's worth a try. If not, then we'll eventually just need to have the windows removed, framing redone and waterproofed, and new windows installed but that'll be later down the road.

Right now we are trying to solidify the roofing/gutter situation. First step is to get the gutters removed before we can really see if there are issues with the roof. Our roofer didn't show too much concern but we won't know until the gutters are off. What we do know is the siding needs to be re-done behind/under certain parts of the gutters and for this we need to bring in our stucco contractor to waterproof and patch up the problem areas. We won't know the extent of this either until the gutters are removed. So that's really the first step.

I have seen the French drain man as well as another guy: Apple drains. Both seem informative. I'll have to consider different ideas for this side of the home but am thinking some combination of french drain, dry river bed, and standard PVC piping tied together may be in order here.

Regarding irrigation, I'm on the fence about it - I think what I may just do is cut the existing line (which branches into multiple parts of this area against the home but eventually feeds the backyard) and replace with a single clean line or two for the backyard extension. I would probably remove just cut out and remove the manifold too. But whether or not we leverage the existing lines and or add to them OR we abandon the system complete, we'll want to decide that prior to filling in this area so that we don't have to dig and lay another line later down the road. We really need to do some form of landscape/irrigation design and think about zones and where we may want to plant things.
« Last Edit: January 20, 2022, 11:18:32 AM by jeromedawg »