Y’all, if I had a dollar for every time someone asked me if gutters just aren’t a thing in central Texas over the last few years, I’d probably have at least enough to do something extravagant like by a beef fajita dinner at Rosa’s Cafe. 😀 In all honesty, I’m sure that I’ve been asked a few more times than that because our house doesn’t have gutters on it, and then my workshop sat there for almost four months without gutters. And I’ve done quite a bit of complaining lately about the dirt continually splashing up on the skirting, which has led to several people asking, “Do houses in your area not have gutters?”
Yes, houses in our area do have gutters. In fact, when I went searching for a company to install gutters on the workshop, I was actually surprised at how many gutter companies there are in my relatively small city. And when I started looking, I thought all gutters were the same. A gutter is a gutter, right? I learned very quickly that that’s not the case.
I didn’t remember our house having gutters on it when we bought it, but I went back and looked at those original pictures I took the day we closed on the house, and there were gutters on the front porch.
I can’t remember any other gutters on the house. I could be mistaken, though. After we closed on the house, we immediately had the roof re-shingled, and I’m pretty sure that’s when the gutters were removed because I know they replaced the metal fascia trim (that metal piece that covers the fascia boards just under the shingles). But if they put them back up (which I don’t remember them doing, and probably at my request to leave them off), they for sure came down for good when we had the vinyl siding replaced with Hardiboard siding.
And then when I finally started working on the front exterior of the house, I always had it in the back of my mind that we needed to put up new gutters, but that item on my “to do” list just never made it to the top of the list. So here we are, eleven years later, and we still don’t have gutters on our house. The only place I’ve ever really considered it a problem was on the front porch. When we get a heavy rain, it’s impossible to walk into the front porch without feeling like the slanted roof is funneling rainwater directly onto the top of your head.
Again, it’s always been in the plans, but since we don’t have really long rainy seasons like other parts of the country, it’s only been a minor inconvenience. And since the house doesn’t have white skirting, the dirt splashing up hasn’t caused a huge eyesore that I can’t unsee. The foundation around the house does get very dirty (as you can see just to the left of the front porch in the photo above). And while it’s not pretty, it’s not nearly as noticeable since that footing around the house is concrete and not bright white like the workshop skirting.
But when I added white skirting to the bottom of the workshop, the problem became very obvious. No matter how many times I go out and sweep off the dirt off of the skirting, it always looks like this a few days later.
And that just won’t do. I’m working too hard to make this workshop look cute because it’s a big part of our overall plan for our back yard, and I just can’t have that white skirting covered in dirt every time it rains. I have plans to tame that dirt that includes covering that area with cardboard, adding lots of mulch, and using mulch glue to hold it in place. (Don’t worry! I don’t be using rubber mulch. 😀 Y’all successfully talked me out of that idea.) But I finally came to realize that no matter what I do to tame that dirt around the building, no amount of cardboard, mulch, and mulch glue is going to solve the problem completely as long as I don’t have gutters on the building.
I’ll be honest. I wasn’t thrilled about the idea of installing gutters on my workshop. I guess I’ve never really paid much attention to gutters, but in my mind, they were just going to detract from the cute cottage look that I was trying to achieve. I imagined them being very distracting and kind of ugly. But I knew they were necessary, so I started looking at the various options.
After looking at several options, I went with a company called Leaf Filter. I liked that their gutters were made of a thicker metal, so they felt and looked much more durable and substantial than the gutters offered by other companies. But what sold me was the way that the leaf guard was constructed. To me, they seemed far and above what others offered, which seemed to be a thin screen of some sort that covered the top of the gutters. I couldn’t imagine those thin screens lasting through the years.
By contrast, the Leaf Filter screens have a pretty heavy vinyl (or maybe PVC, I didn’t ask) grid holding them up from underneath, and that screen/vinyl grid fits inside the top of the gutter, sits on top of metal straps at the top of the gutter, and sits just underneath a metal lip on both the front and back of the gutter along the top edge. Those screen assemblies get screwed into place so that they can’t move around. The whole construction of this design is what sold me on their product. Here’s a look at the screen/grid that fits inside the gutters. And they come with a lifetime warranty that is transferable one time.
But what really shocked me was how much these gutters added to the look of the building. Rather than distracting and being ugly, they gave the building such a finished look that I wasn’t expecting. My workshop has such shallow eaves, and the gutters added depth and gave them a much better appearance. I was so pleasantly surprised! Not only did they NOT look ugly and distracting, but they actually enhanced the look of the building. Never in my life did I expect to LOVE the look of gutters.
I selected white for the gutters, and then I selected a color called Clay for the downspouts. I was also pleasantly surprised at how closely they matched the gray color of the siding.
Here’s a look at the front with the gutters installed. I had them split the front into two sections, leaving me 92″ over the door for the pergola that will go there. And when I told him that my pergola was 92″ wide, he left exactly 92″ centered over the door.
The color match of the downspouts isn’t exact, but it’s pretty darn close!
And again, just look at how much that added to the look of the shallow eaves! Y’all, I couldn’t have been more excited.
I never thought that I’d be so excited about gutters. 😀 But they looked so good that I kept going outside just to look at the gutters.
There’s no pergola going on the back side of the building, so the back is just one long gutter with the downspout on the far end. Here’s a look at the back side without the gutters and with the very shallow eaves.
And here it is with the gutters adding some much-needed depth to the look of the eave on this side.
Here’s a side view so you can see the difference.
And while I didn’t plan the front just to suit my obsessive need for symmetry, I have to admit that I love the fact that it’s two sections, each with its own downspout, making the front perfectly symmetrical. While I would never insist on gutters meeting my need for symmetry, this was the happy result of my planned design.
Of course, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense right now without the pergola. But it’ll make sense once it’s all finished. I do have a plan. I promise. 🙂 And I realize that others may have done this differently, but this is how I chose to do it (after giving it a whole lot of thought and thinking through the plan), so there’s no going back now.
I want to get that dirt off of the skirting boards now and wait for our next rain (which will actually be today, so I need to work fast) so that I can see just how much of a difference the gutters make.
I suspect that they will be doing the bulk of the work to keep the dirt off of the skirting. The rest — the cardboard, mulch, and mulch glue — will help while the gutters do the heavy lifting.
As far as the cost, the Leaf Filter gutters aren’t cheap. I could have gone with other companies for a whole lot less. Even Leaf Filter would have installed gutters without the leaf guard for 1/3 the price that I paid. But since we have so many trees (and my workshop sits very close to a huge oak tree), and I don’t want to be cleaning out gutters on a regular basis, their specific design of leaf guard is the very thing that sold me on this company’s product. I wasn’t at all interested in having them installed without the leaf guard. The total price for my workshop gutters came to $3665. That’s a lot more than I had intended to pay for gutters, but again, I wanted that leaf guard. I hope that investment pays off. And I like the idea of testing this product on my smaller workshop before diving in and having them installed on our house, which will be a much bigger investment if we stick with this company and their product. I’ll keep y’all updated on how they work out.
Addicted 2 Decorating is where I share my DIY and decorating journey as I remodel and decorate the 1948 fixer upper that my husband, Matt, and I bought in 2013. Matt has M.S. and is unable to do physical work, so I do the majority of the work on the house by myself. You can learn more about me here.
