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More Fun With The Yankee Gutters

JonC — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 21:30:35 +0000

I got up on the boom lift today to check out the situation and see what kind of things I’d need. I was thinking that perhaps the gutter was just old and needed some TLC. Well, boy was I wrong. This thing does not even qualify as a Yankee gutter. Apparently the previous owner had a weird concept of how to fix a built in gutter and he just used a really wide strip of aluminum flashing along the gutters length down the whole side of the house. Perhaps it was smooth when it was put in, but it’s just terrible now.

I can’t believe someone would do such a poor fix. I’m a bit more upset that my inspector didn’t mention the gutter was a pile of.. yeah.

It looks like I’m going to definetly have to rip off the fascia, rip off the sofits and rip off the ledgerboard that sits right below the gutter, it’s all rotted or leaking. I may be able to put some kind of drip edge of cap strip over the top cap of the wall framing, but whatever happens I want to make sure I can keep water out of the house, and in a way that will last for a long time to come. I’m having serious doubts as to if I’ll be able to get this done this weekend, and I only have the lift for that long.

I’m thinking that instead of trying to keep the traditional yankee gutter, I may just try to build a large commercial gutter inside of the box, but that raises issues about making sure that the water makes it only into the gutter, and not the house, and that if it were to overflow, it wouldn’t backflow into the box, which means a really good seal between a new drip edge, and the gutter.

I’ll have to figure something out, water inside the house doesn’t work and it’s not going to just quit raining for the forseeable future. I have a friend comming over to take a look at it with me. He’s very good with working with materials and knowing what is compatible and that sort of thing so maybe he will have some good ideas for me, because I’m out of them.

Here are some photos of the previous owner’s ‘fix’. The concrete block is a nice touch…. Just had ANOTHER downpour and collected about 4-5 gallons of water out of the weep holes I put in the ceiling the bedroom… gotta get this fixed!

June 30 Severe Thunder Storm in Ulster County, NY

JonC — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 15:59:47 +0000

I know I’ve been posting a lot of these thunder storm and wild rain downpour videos. I tend to get a lot of search hits for the specific areas and dates though, so I will continue to do so. People seem to be interested in it for personal reasons, or perhaps to show friends, or insurance agents.

Anyways this storm on June 30th, 2009 was pretty intense. It came in 4 waves in this area, so it seemed more like 4 separate thunder storms. Unfortunately the house did not get out unscathed in this one, the built in gutter gave way and leaked water into the walls which managed to spot drywall on the top floor ceiling, and additionally the walls on the first and second floor around the window frames which are right under that gutter got wet as well, peeling some of the drywall tape on the joints by the window frames. Thunderstorm rain always seems to be so much more intense than regular storm rain. I guess all heck just breaks loose in the sky and results in massive downpour.

I didn’t notice this was happening until I saw water dripping down the window blinds behind my computer monitor. When I went upstairs the ceiling was spotting and wet up there in a couple of sheets that extent parallel to the window.

I’ve been trying to get a hold of someone all day to come out and fix or at least temporarily patch it but I could not get a hold of one single person. Possibly because the holiday weekend and all, most ‘make our own schedule’ types are taking the rest of the week off.

I’m not a ladder guy myself, and becoming a quadriplegic for a stupid gutter is not going to be my demise. I called a local rental company and I can get a 35′ boom arm lift for the entire weekend for about 250 delivered, so I’ll probably do that and fix it myself, safely.

I also manufactured a ‘low budget pole cam’ so I could get a look up into the gutters, it worked out pretty well, good enough for me to see where the problem was. Also the soffits in that area are in terrible shape, even more so after that storm, so I may be rebuilding my sofits as well if I have all the tools to do that, my budget is pretty thin at the moment.

Anyway, here is the video, enjoy.. at 1:35 I got the camera to focus right on the rain itself, really impressive downpour.

Here are those additional pictures of the water damage

Weekend Update: Lawns and Scott’s Patchmaster (28 day report)

JonC — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 04:17:56 +0000

This is just a quick update on things. The Scott’s Patchmaster is now right at 28 days and is growing nicely. We’ve had a huge amount of rain here in the NE the last week so that certainly hasn’t hurt things by keeping the patch mulch wet. My only fear is that the weather will go from very wet to super hot and dry with no reasonable transition, which may keep the grass from developing deep roots and result in it getting burnt out in the heat. All you can do at that point is try to keep it wet.

I only got one picture of the patch, but it turned out blurry as it was late at night. I will try to update with a newer photo on Monday or Tuesday if you’re interested in seeing how 4 weeks looks (Update: Good photos at the bottom of this post!) . It looks a lot like the last photos in the 21 Day Scott’s Patchmaster post just a lot more dense than before. Also, it’s very green and makes the rest of the lawn look terrible (but it really is terrible so that’s kind of to be expected). Hopefully we will get to over-seed or cut out the ‘original’ lawn and get some new fresh grass going there, rather than clover, once summer breaks.

I’m a bit concerned about the peninsula lawn which was seeded from scratch with just plain grass seed, mulching material and starter fertilizer. The new grass there has not grown a lot, if at all, since last week and looks kind of odd and lighter colored. In fact now that we’ve gone a full year that section of the lawn is dying out. There’s simply not enough fertility in the soil as it’s mostly sand and keeps leaching out. I don’t have the willpower to fertilize the lawn every 3-4 weeks so I think Spring 2011 I am going to start over by tilling in some good quality soil to the junk that is there now. The new grass in other sections I planted from scratch has grown great, several inches a week and they received exactly the same treatments and similar exposure to rain and sunshine. The soil in those areas is of a much different quality, not sandy at all. The soil on the peninsula is very sandy, so much so we tilled in about 15 bales of peat moss to the 1800 square feet area to try and help it retain moisture and nutrients, and on top of that we’ve had huge amount of rain recently. It’s possible that the rain is just washing the nutrients out of the soil. We put a small amount of fertilizer on Saturday, about 1/4 the amount of a normal fertilizing, to see how the grass responded. The last two nights, though, we’ve gotten long(hours and hours) torrential downpours once again. I’m not sure what to do here but I will have to do some reading to find out whats going on.

I’m hoping it’s not that the soil is draining -too- well and letting the nutrients wash out. I’m not sure of a good solution to that other than ripping up the lawn again in fall, mixing in good quality soil with the sandy soil and then replanting the whole thing, which would be a major pain in the neck.

It’s going to be a busy week, but I’ll try to get some new posts in. I’m in the process of converting my Laser and High Voltage and Hobby websites over to word press and wordpressifying all the existing pages. I’m really happy with WordPress as it makes it so easy to update and modify pages and has a huge number of plugins to make life easy, doing so has given me the urge to get back into my other hobbies!

If you’re looking for Scott’s PatchMaster information please see all my PatchMaster Related Posts

Update:(September 9,2010) It’s been over a year since I posted this 28 day update and I must say that the areas of the lawn which were patched with the PatchMaster are looking pretty good and like they belong in the lawn. I will add in some additional photos so you can see the results, but basically it will just be ‘It looks like the rest of the lawn.’ which is what the goal was going into this whole lawn restoration project. My overall experience is that if you have the right weather conditions, or you are willing to make sure it stays watered and fed, it is a suitable product for this purpose. Remember, the end of August and early September is a great time of year to get some new grass started because it will have the Fall and Spring to become strong before having to endure the next Summer. Good luck and please share your success or failures with this product.