Gutters and Fascia

Why Drainage Matters Here

DFW sits on expansive clay. Clay swells when wet and shrinks when dry. When your roof dumps concentrated water at one spot on the foundation and the rest of the perimeter stays dry, you get differential soil movement, and that is how foundations crack. A gutter run is cheap. Foundation work is not.

What We Do

• Smooth aluminum gutter in five and six inch, formed on site so the only seams are at corners and outlets
• Downspouts sized to the roof area actually draining to each run, not to where the old ones happened to be
• Extensions and underground drainage that move water away from the foundation
• Fascia and soffit repair. Rotted fascia is the most common thing we find behind a failed gutter, because a leaking gutter back-wets the board it hangs on

If your gutters overflow in heavy rain and they are not clogged, they are undersized or under-drained. Our rain arrives fast and in bursts, not as the slow drizzle gutters often get sized for.

Where The Downspout Lets Go

Sizing the gutter is half the job. The other half is deciding where the water lands once it leaves the downspout, and on Metroplex clay that decision has consequences. A downspout dumping against the slab at an inside corner keeps that stretch of soil swollen year round while the sunny south side of the house dries out and pulls away in August. The two sides of the house then sit at different elevations, and doors start sticking.

What we look at on site: how the lot grades, where the neighbor's water arrives, whether the patio or a walkway traps runoff against the foundation, and how far out we need to carry each discharge. Sometimes the answer is a buried drain line to daylight at the back of the lot. Sometimes it is moving one downspout ten feet. We would rather rework the layout than hang new gutter in the same wrong places.