Gutter repair and installation in St. Louis

What St. Louis does to a gutter

Forty-one inches of rain a year is not extreme. What's hard on a gutter here is how it arrives. Spring brings hail and two-inch-an-hour thunderstorms out of the west; July drops the same rain in twenty minutes; and then from December to February the water that's left in a badly pitched run freezes, expands, and pulls the sealant off every corner. Add a late-October sycamore and oak leaf drop that can fill a 5-inch gutter in a week, and a system that would last thirty years somewhere dry gets about twenty here.

The houses make it more interesting. In the city — Tower Grove, Shaw, South Hampton, Holly Hills, the Central West End — the brick homes went up between 1900 and the 1950s with half-round gutters, and on the better streets those are copper. They're worth keeping and most gutter crews won't work on them. In West County, from Kirkwood and Ballwin out to Chesterfield and Wildwood, the subdivisions went up between 1960 and the 1990s and carry the aluminum that was hung when the house was built. That metal is at the end of its life now, and the fascia behind it is often worse than the gutter.

Underneath all of it is clay over limestone and a basement. Almost every St. Louis home has one, finished or not, and the clay holds water against the wall for days after a storm, so a downspout dumping at the foundation wall is the single most common reason a basement gets wet in April. Fixing that is usually a $40 extension or a $300 buried line, not a $6,000 waterproofing job, and it's why every estimate we write ends with where the downspouts drain.

What we do

Gutter repair — resealed corners and end caps, sagging runs re-hung on hidden hangers, crushed or separated downspouts replaced, missing straps, and the fascia rot that turns up behind all of it. Most repairs are $150–$600 and done in a morning. Gutter leak repair, sagging gutter repair and downspout repair St. Louis homeowners call about are all on the repair page.

Seamless gutter installation and replacement — 5-inch or 6-inch aluminum run on site from a coil, .032 gauge, hidden hangers into the rafter tails, 3x4 downspouts where the roof needs them. A typical 160-foot single-story ranch in Florissant or Ballwin is $1,600–$2,700; two-story West County homes run more. See installation and the cost page.

Copper and half-round gutters — repair, re-hang and replacement on the city's older brick homes, in copper or in aluminum half-round when copper isn't in the budget. The copper and half-round page explains what's involved.

Gutter guards — micro-mesh, screen or reverse-curve, chosen for the trees you actually have. Sycamore and oak are not the same problem. The guards page sorts it by tree.

Gutter cleaning — by hand, with the downspouts flushed and a ladder look at the hangers, corners and fascia. Priced flat by house size on the cleaning page.

Where we work

The City of St. Louis, all of St. Louis County — Kirkwood, Webster Groves, Clayton, Florissant, Ballwin, Chesterfield, Wildwood — St. Charles County including St. Charles and O'Fallon, and across the river to Belleville in the Metro East. If your number starts with 314 or 636, you're in the area. Kirkwood and Chesterfield have their own pages because the houses there are different and we're in both most weeks.

Why September is the month to call

Because the leaves haven't dropped yet and the ground hasn't frozen. A corner that leaked all summer can be resealed in an afternoon now; in November it's under six inches of sycamore leaves, and in January the sealant won't cure. The storm-season checklist is the ten-minute walk-around to do this week, and the fall leaf guide tells you when the oaks in your neighborhood will actually let go.