It was about 9pm on a wet Thursday in August when Matt went up to the shed to shut the door against the rain and came back down the garden steps faster than I've ever seen him move. "Get your coat," he said. "Come and look at the gutter." From the top of the garden you look down onto the back of the house, and in the light from the kitchen window we could see water pouring over the front lip of the gutter at the corner, then running down the gable wall in a wide dark stripe. It was exactly the corner where the black mould sits on the inside of the back bedroom.
I felt a bit sick. We'd found that mould in February, moved the wardrobe, washed it off and blamed condensation, the cold gable and the washing we'd dried indoors. All of that was true. None of it explained why that corner never quite dried out, however many windows we opened.
What we'd been told and ignored
Looking back, the clues were all there. The survey had given the gutters and downpipes a condition rating of 2, which means a defect that needs fixing but isn't urgent. In April the roofer who replaced our three tiles pointed at that same back corner and said, "That'll want looking at." We nodded, wrote "gutter" on the list under "later" and didn't look again for four months. We'd viewed the house on a dry September day in 2024 and never seen it in a downpour, which is the one test a gutter really needs.
Two quotes
I rang two people the following week. A guttering firm came, looked from a ladder and quoted £680 to replace the whole back run. The roofer from April quoted £420 to repair it: a new corner joint, the sagging stretch re-hung on proper brackets, and a renewed top section of downpipe. Both of them said our plastic gutters were around thirty years old but not finished. The roofer's view was that the trouble lay in the corner joint and a sag in the run, not the whole length. When someone you've already met on your roof is £260 cheaper and says the rest is sound, it's an easy decision.
In a perfect world I'd have asked for a third quote. But we had a wall that was already wet, and the roofer had a gap in his diary in the last week of September, which was the soonest anyone could do. So we booked him for Wednesday 24 September and paid from the house fund.
The day itself
He came with a mate, which suited my home-working day. At 8.15am I heard a ladder hit the back of the house from my seat in the box room, then a long scraping noise that I eventually worked out was a trowel. The corner joint had a hairline crack, and the section beside it had dropped about 20 mm where one bracket had pulled away from the fascia. Water couldn't reach the outlet, so it pooled and slopped over the front edge at the corner. On top of that sat a small compost heap of moss and grit, shed by the concrete tiles over thirty years.
They cleared it, fitted a new corner joint, re-hung the stretch on two new brackets so it falls towards the downpipe, and replaced the top of the downpipe. Then one of them tipped a bucket of water along the run while the other watched it all the way down. No drips, no overflow. The roofer showed me the photos on his phone before he left, and I was glad he'd taken the "before" ones, because the moss looked like something you'd grow on purpose.
Is the wall drying?
It's early. The dark stripe down the gable has already faded to a pale ghost after a week of mostly dry weather, but brick takes weeks to give up that much water, and the inside corner of the back bedroom still feels cold and slightly clammy if I press the back of my hand to it. I'm not painting or declaring anything fixed yet. A cheap hygrometer is on its way for that room so I can watch the numbers instead of guessing.
What I'd change is simple. I'd have gone up the garden on the first wet evening in April instead of the first wet evening in August, because the roofer had practically drawn me a map. The survey rating, his remark and the mould were three separate clues, and I filed each of them under something else. I'd want to see any house we looked at in a proper downpour now. As he folded his ladder, the roofer said the back run wants a look every autumn, and I've put it in the calendar for October.
Brew count: 6.
