Back To Reality

For Only A Week...


Well, the rain NOAA and the National Weather Service threatened us with--causing us to abandon South Carolina a day early on Saturday--finally got here to the Banks of the Mighty Tennessee River after dark this evening.

In spite of my best efforts spent cleaning most of the crap out of my gutters this afternoon, the stupid little "propeller seeds" from a nearby tree that remained in there when I was finished apparently have managed to pile up again at the downspouts so three out of four of them are CLOGGED...AGAIN...and water is spilling over and pounding a couple of Tomato plants and generally making a mess around the base of the house.

I didn't put the gutters on the house and it amazes me that the old guy that owned it for almost 45 years managed to keep them clean enough to do any good. I've already made several modifications to the downspouts and it looks like I'm going to have to replace two more soon in order to get good flow (they're old small pipes like they used in the 1960's.)

I'd really like to have totally new guttering installed but that's a thousand bucks we really don't have or otherwise want to spend now on "this old house." Thus I think with a little injuneering and some fine tuning of the existing "rainwater collection and discharge system", and then adding a coat of paint when we do the trim and soffits and fascia later this summer, that I can make things work as intended.

I actually hate gutters.

The new "International Building Code" and most local codes by default require them on new construction, but gutters are just a band aid on the water flow/control problem most homeowners face, and most of the time they end up a government mandated architectural eyesore in the process.

If you do a little checking around and look at average and maximum hourly rainfall totals for everyone here in the subtropical southeastern United By-God States of 'Merica you'll see that most houses with even smaller than average roof surface area/roof pitch standards can easily overflow even a commercial grade 6" x 6" gutter system...even with 3" x 4" downspouts...unless you have your builder/contractor install downspouts something like EVERY 10 FEET ALONG THE FRONT AND BACK AND SIDES OF YOUR HOUSE.

And who wants to look at downspouts between every window and door any way?

My solution is to do things the old fashioned way and build the house up on a berm or high spot, then slope the grade/soil/dirt sharply away from the house and let the water flow off the roof in sheets and spill onto the ground naturally and run down across the lawn to the carefully thought out swales (swale = "drainage ditch.")

The problem with that great, simple, workable theory comes today when the "greedy developer/builder" gets a site plan approved by the idiots downtown on the "zoning board" allowing him/her to cram 24 houses on a little 5 acre piece of dirt which slopes toward the middle on all four sides.

Then when it rains and everyone's government mandated gutters overflow everyone ends up living on water front property and someone possibly is flooded out by all of the highly directed water pouring out of downspouts.

Come to think of it, I believe that the code enforcement folks down in Florida have the right idea as I learned when I was permitting a house (which I never ended up building) in Gulf County Florida.

While they still require gutters and down spouts, down there they will only allow your house and other solid, non-permeable things like concrete/asphalt driveways and patios to cover something like 45% of the total real estate area of your lot.

That way when monsoon season hits or a Hurricane or Tropical Storm comes ashore the water which lands on your property has a place to go and soak into the ground in the process before washing your car and your neighbors Dachshund Puppy into the bay or Gulf of Mexico.

Fortunately up here in Eastern Tennessee we have a near half acre lot like everyone else on our street and we're on the uphill side of the subdivision so other than my gutters pissing me off two or three times a year we don't see many serious water problems.

Still, if it were up to me I'd take a crowbar and a hammer and BEAT THOSE OLD GUTTERS off my house and just let things drip all around when it rains.

Don't tell the government morons, but from what I can tell that's what happens (water pouring over the flooded gutters in sheets) at least half the time on most homes due to stopped up gutters/downspouts...so what good does making people buy them (gutters) if they don't keep them clean?

Maybe Obama and the Obamamanics can appoint a "Gutter Tsar" to run around inspecting gutters and fining people for having trees and weeds growing up out of their stopped up gutters like the stupid renters a couple of doors down from here do as I write this tirade.

Wait...

OK...I'm going to stop writing now because the longer I go the more pissed off I get it seems about...of all things...government mandated GUTTERS...

oh....OH....ah....Ah....AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH...

Clunk...

(the sound of me falling over backwards out of my chair...)