Fireplace Screens Blog

There are lots of quick and easy tasks that can be done to keep your home looking great and maintain it’s value. But sometimes it is easy to disregard or neglect these tasks since they seem to be trivial and of negligible value. And one of these seemingly unimportant jobs is maintaining the rain gutters on your home.

Installing rain gutters on your house and keeping them clean and in good shape includes a number of benefits. It seems obvious that your home is outside in the weather. While that is true, rain gutters and eave troughs really can protect your home. They do this by keeping most of the rain away from your exterior house siding or masonry and by redirecting the rainwater out and away from your foundation.

Rain running off a roof without gutters onto concrete driveways and walks can pit out and gouge a channel in a matter of just a couple of years. And if you don’t have rain gutters the large amount of water coming off your roof and falling right next to the foundation of your home may cause settling of the ground close to the foundation. This will cause the thousands of gallons of water that fall on your roof each year along with the water around your home to seep down alongside your basement walls. If you are living in a climate where it freezes during the cold months, this is an especially bothersome problem because the expanding and contracting of the supersaturated frozen earth is among the main causes of foundation cracks and basement wall problems.

If you don’t have rain gutters on your home, it is easy to install them. The vinyl rain gutters available today at local diy stores are fairly easy and quick to put up. You can get gutter contractors do your rain gutter installation and some of these offer seamless rain gutters which is a nice feature. However if you would like to do it yourself this is a project well within the reach of anyone with a little DIY skill and can be done over a weekend.

If you do plan on doing the job yourself, consider renting roll off containers or using roll off dumpsters to quickly and inexpensively get rid of any construction waste. And if you do that, it’s a perfect time to do a quick clean up of your home and yard and throw out any other debris or trash that you have.

Then it is simply a matter of maintaining the gutters by cleaning them twice a year, spring and fall, and you will add years to the life of your home. When you clean the gutters, remove all the waste you find inside. Check the openings from where the downspout connects to make sure that it isn’t plugged and that the water can run freely.

Repair any damaged or wobbly gutters and ensure that you’ve got the proper slope for drainage. A drop of approximately 1 inch per each twenty feet of run is effective. Fix any leaks or holes that you come across with gutter sealant. You can get gutter and flashing sealant in tubes that fit your caulking gun. This is a quick and easy method to fix small problems and keep everything in good repair.

For those who have a lot of leaves in your yard that create frequent plugging problems for you, you can keep them out of the gutters by utilizing gutter screen to keep most of them out. There are also several new products which use a porous foam filler or brush type material that you place in your eave troughs that fill the space and keep leaves and debris out, but permit the water to run through.

By taking a few hours every year to examine and clean up your rain gutters you’ll take away many years of wear from your home’s siding and masonry along with helping to keep your basement dry. It is a simple and quick do-it-yourself project with a big payback for the short amount of time it will take you to get it done.

Repairing Holes in House Wood before Painting and Finish Sanding

It would be nice if your wooden home needed no more than basic house repair. Only caulk and scrape a bit, lay down some painting drop cloths, and roll on some layers of high quality exterior paint.

Maintaining your house is more difficult. Rather than easy, you usually have to repair the wooden facings of the house.

My property needed quite a bit of work. The steel sheeting near the roof gutters leaked and allowed rainwater to soak the wood behind the eve. As the years passed, the wood became rotten and caved in the painted surface.

This repair I wanted to do on my own. I was worried whether wood putty could fill in the gaps properly.

My friend down the block worked on the wood of his home many weekends to control those darn flying termites. This guy’s work quality held up very well. He knew something I did not.

Fill in Wood Holes with Bondo then Use Wood Working Power Tools to Finish Sanding

He told me a contractor had recommended to always apply Bondo to fill larger holes in wood. To get a better understanding see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bondo_(putty)

I had used Bondo on a car repair. This auto filler kept its shape. It permitted sanding and lathing. When he mentioned using Bondo, I instantly knew that this was the right answer.

Using Bondo, the approach is to make repairs in layer after layer with a lot applied first and thinner sections to finish. Furthermore, you can do fine finishing work, combining molding boards and regular kitchen wax paper. To prep for painting by sanding all you need to do is to use one of the wood power sanders to make the Bondo blend smoothly with the wood.

If you have a wooden deck, you should be aware that you can also apply this auto patcher to fill in gouges in the surface of your wood deck. It comes in handy, when you are doing redwood deck maintenance.

Note the fact that Bondo finishes with a reddish hew and this will be obvious, if you only use a transparent water proofing on your wood deck. When you desire to seal your wood deck after patching with Bondo, you might need to use an opaque sealant.

Also it is not necessary to go to an automotive store for Bondo. You can get Bondo at Lowes or Home Depot. Incidentally, my painting prep job shows no signs of deterioration after many years.