Don Hershey designed our house with with a very slim roofline. The one story structure has a low 2/12 pitch and as the roof is pitched down the four foot overhangs have a slight pitch upward. The facia board is very narrow and there were no gutters. A previous owner added a gutter around two sides of the garage and to get enough pitch for the water to roll they had to replace the facia with a wider piece of cedar. The gutter prevented ice from forming near the door but over time the the corners leaked. I patched them a few times but it didn’t last and the corners were especially treacherous in the winter. I thought there had been an innovation of some sort and gutters were were now made without any seams so I asked around for a contractor to replace ours.
A guy came out to give us an estimate and he was very professional. He told us a crew would do the work and he scheduled the job. The forecast called for rain that day so they rescheduled. They called the morning of the new appointment and said they would have to cancel again because of the rain. I said it wasn’t raining here but that didn’t matter. We were given a new appointment, a month away, when we returned from Spain. It was raining that day but they showed up anyway.
There were two guys. The foreman told us the other guy was new and he didn’t speak much English. I told him Peggi could speak Spanish if that helps. He bent over to pick up a tool and I noticed he was wearing flannel boxer shorts with cartoon characters on them. I went in the house and they started work. About five minutes later the main guy rang our bell and said he had to go to Urgent Care because he smashed his knuckles with his hammer. He had his blue stocking cap wrapped around his hand.
They came back out the next day but this time there were three of them. The new guy seemed sharper than the others but he kept his cell phone in his pocket playing music the whole time. They cracked the facia board ripping the old gutters off and used long screws to attach the new gutters. They came out the back of the facia board and are visible if you look up. I came out to check up on them and the lead guy showed me the pitch by holding a six inch level along the bottom of the gutter. My neighbor has a six foot level. This looked like a toy. When they left we found scraps of metal and nails in the driveway and I noticed a long sections of the new gutters wasn’t even screwed in. They did me a favor. I’ll do that with shorter screws.
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