What a twenty-five-foot lot does to a gutter job
Most of the brick flats and frame bungalows between Kingshighway and Hampton went up between 1900 and 1940, on lots about as wide as a modern driveway plus a car. Two feet of setback on one side, four on the other if the plat was generous. The gutter itself is ordinary work. Getting a ladder, a brake and a thirty-foot stick of aluminum into a space laid out for a coal wagon is the part that takes planning.
So we walk the lot before we price anything. Where the gangway has firm ground and enough width, we set from both elevations and the day runs clean. Where a chain-link fence, a condenser pad or a raised planter takes up the only footing, we stage off the alley or the front and the crew loses an hour or two. Better to find that on estimate day.
Running gutter on site still beats sectional here, even on a short house. A 24-foot front in one piece has no joint in the middle to leak, and the only sealed points are the miters and the end caps. Store-bought sectional puts a lap every ten feet, and each lap eventually drips onto the sidewalk below it.
The downspout that drains onto somebody else's ground
This is the conversation we have most often up here. A downspout comes down the side wall, dumps at grade, and the water travels three feet before it crosses a property line. The neighbor ends up with a wet strip along their foundation, and the two households have a problem that started on a roof.
The fix is mechanical, not legal. We move the outlet to a front or rear corner where there's somewhere for water to go, or we run solid PVC under the gangway to a pop-up emitter out front with a cleanout at the turn. We won't bury corrugated flex pipe. It kinks at every bend, silt settles in the low spots, and in a few years you're breaking concrete to dig out a plugged line.
On lots with almost no front yard, the honest answer is sometimes a discharge toward the street. We'll say so instead of selling a splash block and calling it drainage.
Short hip roofs carry more water than they look like they do
Owners see a small house and assume a small gutter is plenty. Roof area doesn't care about the footprint. A 900-square-foot hip sheds every drop that hits it, and when three of the four planes funnel toward one corner, that corner takes more gallons a minute than a much larger gable would.
We measure the tributary plane, note the pitch, and count outlets. Most Hill houses are fine on 5-inch K-style with a 3x4 downspout. Sometimes the cheaper and better answer is a second outlet on the long run rather than upsizing the whole elevation. If you want the arithmetic behind that, the gutter sizing guide lays it out.
Rear additions are where we do push bigger. A low-slope porch or kitchen roof feeding into the main run at the back corner is a classic overflow point on these houses, and 6-inch trough with a 3x4 out of it settles the argument.
Fascia, soffit and the wood you can't see from the ground
Take a gutter off a Hill bungalow that's been leaking at the back miter and you often find a fascia board that's gone soft in a two-foot stretch. A hidden hanger will bite into that board and feel tight on install day. It won't hold the first time wet snow slides off the hip.
We probe before we quote and we say what the board costs. If it's rotted, it gets cut out, replaced and wrapped, then the new run goes on. Doing it the other way around means paying for the same section twice. Where the soffit is original beadboard, we'd rather patch and paint than cover something that took a carpenter a week to build.
There's a longer write-up on the wood side of this in our page on rotted fascia board.
What we do on Hill houses
New run, correctly sized
5-inch or 6-inch aluminum rolled on the block and hung on hidden hangers.
Learn moreMove the discharge
Reroute outlets, bury solid PVC, set an emitter past the corner of the building.
Learn moreFix what's there
Re-pitch a sagging run, reseal a miter, replace a crushed downspout behind a porch post.
Learn moreSoffit and fascia
Rotted board cut out and wrapped before anything new gets hung on it.
Learn moreCleaning on tight lots
Hand-cleared troughs and flushed outlets, including the rear addition roof.
Learn moreGuards, if the trees justify them
Stainless micro-mesh where sycamores and pin oaks actually load the run.
Learn more
Three things we'll turn down
Guards on a run that's already failing. Standing water in a trough means the pitch is wrong. Putting a cover over it hides the problem from the only person who could have caught it.
Copper on a house that isn't asking for it. Copper belongs on some St. Louis homes and we install it. On a plain brick flat with painted trim, baked-enamel aluminum in a matched color looks right and costs a fraction of it.
A cleaning when the actual failure is a downspout crushed flat behind a porch column or a garage wall. We find a few of those every season. Clearing the trough above one changes nothing at all.
Different housing stock, different failures. Owners over in Tower Grove deal with 4-inch original runs on tall brick two-stories, and the estimate looks nothing like one written on The Hill.
The Hill gutter questions
Can you work if there's no room between my house and my neighbor's?
Almost always, yes. We size the ladder to the gap and stage from the alley or the front when the gangway won't take footing. What we ask for is a heads-up about fences, dogs and condenser units so the crew isn't solving that at seven in the morning.
My downspout floods my neighbor's yard. Can that be fixed without digging up the whole lot?
Usually. Moving the outlet to a different corner solves a lot of these for the price of a few feet of downspout. If the grade genuinely runs the wrong way, we bury solid PVC through the gangway to a pop-up emitter, which is a trench about a shovel wide.
Is 5-inch enough on a bungalow this small?
For most Hill roofs, yes, as long as the downspout is a 3x4 and the outlets are in the right places. The exception is a rear addition with a low-slope roof dumping into the main run. That corner often wants 6-inch trough.
Do you have to take the soffit apart to hang gutter?
No. We work off the fascia. The soffit only comes into it if the board behind the gutter is rotted or if birds have opened a gap, and we tell you that at the estimate rather than on install day.
Can you match the gutter to the trim color on an older house?
In most cases. Baked-enamel aluminum comes in a range of standard colors and we bring chips out to hold against the trim in daylight. If nothing is close, painting a run after it's hung is an option, though it won't carry the same finish warranty.
Blocks and neighborhoods nearby
Tower Grove · St. Louis · University City · Affton · Webster Groves · Maryland Heights
Free estimate on The Hill
Tell us which side of the house the water is going. We'll walk the lot before we quote.
More on drainage and sizing
A St. Louis gutter company that works tight lots
Third generation, family-run since 1947, and a real person picks up at midnight.