Old House Handyman: Painting gutters is needed for old houses

As I put a ladder up against the front-porch roof one day last month, my neighbor shouted from across the street, “Painting the house?”

“Nope,” I said. “Painting the gutters.”

She was perplexed, clearly wondering: Who paints gutters and why?

Our gutters are made of old-fashioned galvanized steel. That type of gutter was on the house when we bought it 32 years ago. We have since replaced all of the gutters with new galvanized steel.

Why, you ask? Why not use modern aluminum gutters, which have been popular since the 1960s?

The half-round steel gutters fit the character of the house, which was built in 1870.

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And, we have learned that because the half-round gutters are shallower and are wider at the top than the more angular modern gutters, the old-school gutters don’t hold leaves like modern gutters. They require an occasional cleaning, but for most of the year, leaves that fall into the gutters tend to eventually dry out and blow away.

The process of galvanizing steel — dipping it in molten zinc to inhibit rust — dates back the mid-1700s and became popular in the mid-1800s. And while it does a good job, it’s not a permanent protection against rust — especially when rushing rainwater carries the abrasive grit that flakes off of asphalt shingles.

My 20-year-old gutters were rusting, and that’s why I was up on a ladder with a steel brush, a cleaning brush, a cleaning rag, a paint brush and a bucket of silver roof paint.

I learned the process of cleaning and painting gutters as a young teenager, when I was schooled by my dad. He assigned me to this task because he, too, had steel gutters. He also had a young teenage boy who he must have thought would be safer working on a 20-foot ladder during the summer than if he were on the ground with no specific tasks to keep him busy.

The process goes like this: Climb up a ladder and clean debris from the gutter, use an old paint brush to clean out dust and grit, use a steel brush to clean off any remaining debris and loose rust, use the soft-bristled old paint brush again to clean the gutter and finally wipe it clean with a rag.

In a few places, I sadly found that the rust had gone so deep that the steel was pitted with small holes that allowed water to drip from the bottom of the gutter. I patched those places with roofing tar from a caulking tube before using a paint brush to liberally apply the silver roofing paint, which cost about $25 a gallon.

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I painted gutters on three sides of the house. The fourth side has a new gutter, and new galvanized gutters have an oily film on the surface of the metal, so I’m going to give it a year or so for the weather to wear off the film. I’ll put it on my to-do list for next summer. (If only I had a teenage boy with idle hands!)

Meanwhile, I moved on to painting the west side of the house, which hasn’t been painted in a decade or more. No one will notice that I’ve painted it, because we haven’t changed the color of our house in four decades. We picked these colors — Glidden’s “Smoked Pearl,” a gray with a touch of tan, for the base; a trim color of butter-cream, the name of which escapes me; and “Cordovan,” a burnt red “eye-liner” for window and door frames — for Old House No. 1 nearly 40 years ago and brought them with us to Old House No. 2.

We had seen this color scheme in one of the old-house books we scoured for ideas when we first started our old-house adventures with Old House No. 1, which was built in 1876.

Because we never change the colors, we never have to paint the whole house at once, which would be a very daunting task. Painting one side when it needs it means that we paint more often than some other folks but spend less time and money painting in any given year.

This year, for example, I spent about $200 on paint, a few tubes of caulk and some new brushes. And I spent three full days, mostly by myself, scraping and painting the west side of the house. One of my daughters helped for part of an afternoon, which was much appreciated.

And while no one will notice, I have the satisfaction of knowing that the siding and trim on our 154-year-old house are well protected from the weather, which is the main reason we paint.

Alan D. Miller is a former Dispatch editor who teaches journalism at Denison University and writes about old house repair and historic preservation based on personal experiences and questions from readers.

[email protected]

@youroldhouse

This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Old House Handyman: Needed painting of gutters and siding