New gutter installation across Lebanon and Boone County.

The house that was never built with a gutter

More Boone County homes than you would expect were never designed to have one. Some are older farmhouses built with wide overhangs, on the assumption that the eave would throw water far enough off the walls. Some are additions or attached garages built years after the original house, tied into the roofline but never tied into the gutter system. Some are new-construction spec homes where the builder ran gutters on the street-facing elevation for curb appeal and skipped the back and sides to save cost, on the theory the buyer would deal with it later. Later is usually now.

A roof with no gutter does not fail all at once. It fails a little every time it rains. Water sheets off the eave in a line, and over a few seasons that line becomes a trench in the mulch bed, a stripe of mud splashed up the siding, and soil compacted or washed away right where your foundation needs it undisturbed. Basements in this area sit on Boone County clay, which does not drain, it sheds. Water that is not caught and carried away from the foundation sits against it, and a wet foundation is how you end up with a cracked one.

This is a different job than replacing a gutter that already exists. There is no old system to match, no existing downspout locations to reuse whether or not they were in the right place. We start from the roof itself: how many planes drain where, how the valleys converge, and where the water needs to end up once it leaves the house.

Sizing the system to the roof, not the house

We install 6-inch K-style seamless gutter on every job, full stop. We do not offer 5-inch or half-round. A 5-inch trough is what a lot of builders default to because it is cheap, but it scales to roughly 5,500 square feet of roof drainage area before it is doing more than it was built for, while a 6-inch trough scales to roughly 8,000 square feet, and the material cost difference between the two is small compared to what the extra capacity buys you on a hard rain. We would rather install one gutter system that outperforms the roof it is on than sell a smaller one and revisit it in a few years.

What actually changes house to house is the downspout, which is usually the real bottleneck, not the trough. A standard 2-by-3-inch rectangular downspout is rated for roughly 600 square feet of roof area; step up to a 3-by-4-inch downspout and that jumps to around 1,200 square feet, using the same 6-inch gutter above it. On a lot of Boone County homes we run 3x4 downspouts as the default on the primary elevations, purely because the wider downspout is what keeps a hard July thunderstorm inside the system instead of backing it up over the edge.

Roof pitch changes the math too. A steep roof sheds water faster and harder than a shallow one, which means the same square footage of roof area can dump more volume per minute onto a steep-pitched section than a low one. Where a valley on a steep roof converges with another plane, we treat that corner as its own drainage problem and often give it a dedicated downspout rather than routing it into a long run that already has other water in it.

Where the downspouts belong, and where the water goes after that

Downspout placement is not just aesthetics. As a working rule we plan on roughly one downspout for every 35 to 40 feet of gutter run, and sooner than that if a valley or a secondary roof plane is feeding extra water into that section. We keep them off patios, walkways and window wells, and off the corner of the house that faces a neighbor's driveway if there is any way around it.

What happens after the downspout is where a lot of installs stop short. Discharging four feet of water onto mulch right at the foundation corner accomplishes almost nothing, it just moves the erosion problem four feet over. We route discharge with either a splash block angled away from the house or a solid buried pipe run out to daylight or a pop-up emitter well clear of the foundation, and we check the grading itself. Ground within the first ten feet of the house should fall away from it, roughly six inches of drop over that distance is the commonly used benchmark, and on a lot of Boone County lots that grading was never actually cut in when the house was built. A gutter system is only half the job if the water it collects just gets re-routed back toward the same wall.

Fascia and drip edge, checked before we hang anything

On a house with no existing gutter, the fascia board has usually been taking direct weather for as long as the house has stood, and we routinely find soft spots or bare, checked wood once we get a ladder up to it. We do not hang new hardware into fascia that will not hold a screw in five years. Fascia gets repaired or replaced where it needs it, and we confirm drip edge is present and properly lapped over the gutter apron, so the roof underlayment sheds into the trough instead of behind it. Hidden hangers go into solid wood, screwed through the fascia into the rafter tails themselves wherever we can reach them, not just toenailed into the board.

How a new gutter job runs at your house

1. Free estimate and roof read. We walk the roofline, count planes and valleys, measure the drainage area feeding each run, and decide downspout size and placement before we ever price it. The gutter itself is always 6-inch K-style.
2. Fascia and drip edge check. Anything soft or exposed gets repaired or replaced, and drip edge gets corrected if it is missing or lapped wrong.
3. Fabrication on site. Seamless gutter is formed from aluminum coil to the exact length of each run, so there are no lap joints along the way, only at corners.
4. Hang and pitch. Hidden hangers set at a consistent spacing, the whole run pitched toward the downspout end rather than sitting level.
5. Downspouts and discharge. Outlets are cut, downspouts run and strapped, and discharge is routed to a splash block or buried line well clear of the foundation.
6. Water test. We run water down each length from the far end before we call it finished, to confirm it drains clean and does not pond at an end cap or back up at a corner.

Warranty

Every new gutter system we install carries a 2-year workmanship warranty on the installation itself, not just the material. See the full warranty breakdown for how that compares to our paint and roofing coverage.

Recent installs