Gutter repair and replacement in Upper Arlington, Ohio

Gutters in Upper Arlington

Upper Arlington is two towns. South of Lane Avenue — the Old Arlington historic district, the streets off Tremont and Cambridge, the river side along Riverside Drive — is 1918–1950 brick and stone: colonials, Tudors, Cape Cods, a lot of them with slate roofs, copper or galvanized half-round gutters on cast brackets, and box gutters built into the cornice on the biggest houses. North of Lane out to Henderson Road is 1950s–70s ranches and split-levels, mostly brick with aluminum K-style gutters that have been replaced once already and are due again.

Over all of it is the tree canopy that makes UA look the way it does: silver maples, red oaks, sycamores and elms planted when the streets were laid out, now 70 to 100 years old. They fill gutters faster than anywhere else we work, and the leaf calendar runs from the maples in October to the last oaks in early December.

Half-round and box gutters on the old houses

Half-round gutters carry less water than K-style of the same width, and the originals on Old Arlington homes are often 5-inch copper or galvanized steel that's been patched for decades. The right fix depends on what's there. Galvanized half-round with rust-through gets replaced with new half-round — aluminum or copper — on the existing bracket spacing, so the house looks the way it did. Copper with a split seam gets soldered, not caulked. Box gutters in the cornice get cleaned out, dried, and relined with new metal or a fluid-applied membrane; where the wood trough underneath has rotted, it's rebuilt first. Box gutter repair on a UA colonial is quoted after we've had a look inside the trough, because that's where the cost lives.

Slate roofs change the work too. Nobody walks on slate. Gutters under slate are hung and serviced from ladders with standoffs, and the drip edge and the last course of slate are left alone. If a roofer is coming to replace broken slates, the gutter work should happen the same week, and we'll coordinate.

The north-of-Lane replacement

The 1950s–70s ranches between Lane and Henderson are a more ordinary job: aluminum K-style, usually the second set the house has had, with spike hangers and 2x3 downspouts. Replacement with seamless .032 aluminum, 3x4 downspouts and hidden hangers is $1,500–$2,400 on a typical 160-foot ranch, one day. Under the big maples on those streets we'll talk about micro-mesh guards at the same time, because the crew is already on every foot of the run.

Basements and the old clay pipes

Old Arlington homes often have downspouts that drop into a clay tile at grade and disappear. Those tiles run to a dry well, to a storm drain, or, on the oldest streets, to the sanitary sewer — and after 90 years most of them are broken a few feet from the house, dumping water at the foundation. If the basement is wet at one corner, the tile at that corner is the first suspect. We cap and redirect to a buried drain line or a pop-up emitter, which is $250–$600 per downspout and far cheaper than what an interior waterproofer will quote.

What we do here

• Gutter repair — resoldering copper, resealing corners, re-hanging after ice, box gutter relining
• Seamless replacement — K-style on the ranches, half-round on the historic homes
• Gutter guards — micro-mesh, the only thing that stops maple seeds
• Gutter cleaning — early December here, not October, because of the oaks
• Downspout drain lines — replacing broken clay tiles at the foundation

Nearby

We also cover Grandview Heights, Marble Cliff and the Columbus neighborhoods along the Olentangy. Zip codes 43221 and 43220. Same crews and written pricing as Columbus.