Dammit... I Am Just Not That Handy...

I admit it, I am not that handy of a person.  I will do what I can, but that is at best limited.   I hate to paint.  I am not a fan of power tools (the noise & vibration).  My ventures into plumbing end at installing a new faucet. I avoid most yard work because of allergies.  However, today, I had to be somewhat handy.  Damn.

We've had a lot more storms here recently, we're just a few couple of hours south of Joplin, Missouri.  Which largely looks like the pictures above due to a storm earlier this week.  My area was lucky, there was just a lot of wind damage in the area.

The rain gutters weren't so fortunate.  They were pulled away from the roof.  I thought, surely I can tighten up some loose screws or even drill a few more in to the soffit.  Hah.  This old house is a grand old bitch.  Adding to the lack of upkeep on the place, was the complete idiocy of whoever installed the gutters in the first place.

The gutters were installed with 1 inch metal screws.  Metal screws that were drilled into questionable wood.  Instead of anchoring the gutter with long gutter screws & ferrules into the fascia board & header, they mounted it onto a tiny add-on strip of 1x2 strapping.   This placed the gutter almost an inch from the actual house & allowed all sorts of crap to get behind the gutter, like dirt, ice & pissed off wasps.

I live in a town where NO ONE seems to know how to do the simplest of construction skills. So I, the one with little, to no knowledge of these things, attempted to fix it.  In the back, there was no lowered soffit panel, so I anchored the gutter on both sides with a bolt fastened with a nut & washers on both sides of the bolt.  In the front, there was a soffit panel in the way so I stuck with self-sealing metal roofing bolts.

Will it hold?  For now, but probably not for long.  Once they come down again, it's so long gutters.  I checked around & just for someone to do what little I did would've cost over $300.  To have the whole gutter system replaced would've been closer to $600 - 800.   & there is absolutely no guarantee that the next people would do any better of a job than the one I'm dealing with now.  That also fails to take into account for all the wood on the fascia that would need replacing.  So the total would probably be closer to $800 to $1,000.

I hate maintenance...

Tell me again about the joys of owning your own home.

Hope you're all doing well wherever you are.