Gutters Are Part
of the Roof Edge
Our second Yelp review this week was for rain gutters. Here is what we look at on a gutter job, and most of it isn't the gutter.
Our second Yelp review this week was for rain gutters. Here is what we look at on a gutter job, and most of it isn't the gutter.
Jesse C. wrote that the crew "took pride in the quality of their work" on his rain gutters (Yelp, October 2026). Thank you, Jesse. It is a good excuse to write down what we look at on a gutter job, because a lot of it isn't the gutter. A gutter is the last few inches of the roof edge, and it is only as good as the wood it hangs on and the metal that feeds it water.
Our gutters are seamless aluminum. The material comes off a coil and gets formed on site into one continuous piece that runs the length of the wall. A long straight run is one piece of gutter, not sections joined every few feet. You still have corners and outlets, but every joint you don't have is a joint that can't come apart later.
Gutters attach to the fascia board, the board along the edge of the roof. If that board is rotted, new gutters on it are a waste. So we look at the fascia as the work goes. If a board behind the new gutter is too far gone to hold it, we photograph it and write up the quantity and the price, and it gets replaced after you sign the change order, not as a surprise on the invoice.
If the roof is coming off anyway, that is the cheapest time to deal with fascia. I wrote about that in the best time to replace fascia.
A drip edge is the strip of metal along the roof edge, tucked under the roofing and down over the top of the fascia. Its little lip flicks the water off the roof and into the gutter instead of letting it wrap around and soak into the wood. No drip edge, and the fascia rots behind even the best gutter. More in my drip edge post.
A gutter only moves water to the corner of the house. The downspouts and the drainage routing decide where it goes from there, and the answer should be somewhere useful, away from the house.
Look at the gutters from the ground, and at the splash zones under the downspouts. If they are full of what looks like coarse sand, that is granules coming off the shingles. It isn't an emergency the first time you notice, but it is worth having someone look at the roof. Here is what granule loss means.
We match the face of the gutter to the fascia color and the rest to the color of the wall. Done right, the gutter stops reading as a separate stripe bolted onto the house and starts reading as part of it. That is usually the moment people get happy about a gutter, which is not a sentence I get to say often.
We install gutter guards, and plenty of homeowners are glad they did. Whether they make sense on your house depends on your roof and what is hanging over it, so ask at the estimate and you will get a real answer instead of a pitch. Rain barrels we only put on gutters we installed.
Plenty of our gutter work rides along with a roof replacement, because the fascia is already getting attention. But gutters are their own job too. If your roof is fine and your gutters are not, that is a normal call to make. See our rain gutter page.
A gutter is only as good as the board it hangs on and the edge metal that feeds it.
Free estimate on gutters alone or with a roof, in writing, with the fascia looked at first. We also do asphalt shingle roofs, tile replacement with new tile, tile lift and relay, and flat roofs across the Inland Empire.
(909) 819-8394