Gutters

I believe I mentioned that I'd gotten quotes for the gutters. There is exactly one part of the roof with working gutters: the sunroom. Those gutters leak, but they at least guide water to a downspout. (Said downspout being on top of the second floor back room, whence the water plummets twenty-five feet down to splatter against the foundation, but that's why we need more gutters.)

The cheapest quote was $1480, for 5" seamless gutter throughout. Why? Well, to answer this question, the kids and I clambered all over the roof and measured the entire thing. This was made far more convenient by the fact that you can climb out windows onto any point of the house except for the top roof, and you can climb from the sunroom's roof up onto that by means of the stack of bricks I put there after disassembling the back chimney during this summer's roof project.

Anyway, not including the sun roof, we have 385 linear feet of gutter-needing roof. 60'2" of that is the front porch, which will need not only gutters, but some reconstruction; the existing box gutters are just as bad as neglected box gutters always are.

The drawing you see is a work in progress - turns out that at a scale of 0.5cm/foot the house needs three sheets of paper - but you can see the three back sections of roof. (1) is the dining room embayment, kitchen, and back rooms; (2) is the upstairs back room (the Blue Room); and (3) is the sunroom, which has an independent roof. The dotted lines are adjoining brick wall.

At any rate, I have more or less decided not to hire the gutters done. I might change my mind for the top ones, but if I can manage to do the work from on top of the roof (with a safety rope) I'm going to do it myself. Only if I give up will I call the men with ladders.

I'm probably just going to go with dirt-cheap aluminum K-profile gutters (i.e. your "standard gutter"), but a mention on This Old House pointed me to a place in Michigan that sells some much, much prettier ones: Classic Gutters - who knew gutters could be so snazzy? Maybe in a few years I'll replace the cheap-o gutters I'll be putting up now. These make me salivate.

Anyway, cheap gutters (and not-so-cheap gutters, but not like the classics above) can be had online at Gutter Supply - the link goes not to their gutter page, but to their finials. Finials are those little pointy things on the peaks of roofs. I'm considering some finials here and there on The House - maybe sometime after it's rendered habitable. But this way, I don't lose the link.

(By the way, the reason you don't see more finials is that the really slick ones are ungodly expensive. The Carousel finial on that page is $1489.23 "each" - I'll take three!)