Everything on the outside of a house is being worked on constantly by weather, and none of it announces when it needs attention. A blocked gutter costs nothing to clear and a great deal to ignore, because the damage it causes appears somewhere else entirely, usually inside, usually months later.
That delay is the whole problem. By the time a stain shows on an upstairs ceiling the cause has been running for a season or more, and the repair is no longer the gutter. These guides deal with the outside jobs on the basis that catching them early is the entire saving.
Each one covers what to look for, when in the year to look, and the point at which a job stops being yours and wants a tradesman with a ladder, a scaffold or a licence.
In a mild climate snow is an event and the roof shrugs it off within a day. Where it lies for weeks, the roof has a different job, and the trouble usually starts not with the weight of the snow but with the thin line of ice that forms along the eaves.
How an ice dam forms
Heat escaping from the house warms the roof deck above the living space. Snow on that part of the roof melts from underneath, and the water runs down the slope until it reaches the overhang, which sits outside the heated walls and stays below freezing. There it refreezes. Each day adds to the ridge of ice, and before long it is holding back a pool of meltwater with nowhere to go.
Tiles and slates shed water running downhill; they were never meant to hold it standing. The pooled water works back up under the courses and drips into the loft, often far from the eaves, so the first sign indoors can be a stain in the middle of a bedroom ceiling.
The damage you do not see in spring
A drip that ran for a few weeks in January soaks the insulation, and wet insulation stops insulating, which makes the next dam worse. The roof timbers and the boards above them stay damp well after the thaw. By early summer the underside of the deck can be furred with black growth, and the musty smell drifts down through the ceiling hatch. In places with long, snowy winters like western New York, homeowners have learned to have Buffalo attic mold experts look over the loft after a bad ice-dam season, because the growth is usually spread across far more of the deck than the original leak.
Stop the heat getting into the roof
The lasting fix is a cold roof. Seal the gaps where warm air leaks into the loft: the ceiling hatch, light fittings, pipe and cable holes, and the top of internal walls. Then bring the insulation up to a proper depth, kept clear of the eaves so air can still enter there.
Let the loft breathe
Ventilation carries away the little heat and moisture that still get through. Eaves vents feed cold air in low, and ridge or high-level vents let it out. If insulation has been packed into the eaves and blocked them, pull it back and fit rafter trays to hold the airway open.
Clearing snow safely
A roof rake used from the ground can pull the bottom metre of snow off the roof after heavy falls, which removes the meltwater supply before the dam can build. Never climb onto an icy roof, never chip at a dam with an axe, and never use salt on tiles. If a dam has already formed and water is coming in, warm water or a calcium chloride sock laid across the ice will cut a channel to let it drain until the weather turns.
Clearing the gutters is only half the job. Every litre a roof collects ends up at the bottom of a downpipe, and what happens to it there decides whether a heavy storm passes harmlessly or spends the night against the house.
Follow each downpipe to its end
Walk round in the rain and see where each pipe discharges. Some run into an underground drain through a gully, some feed a soakaway somewhere in the garden, and some simply stop over a splash block or a patch of gravel. That last arrangement leaves a whole roof's runoff a few inches from the brickwork.
A pipe that disappears into the ground needs a gully you can see and clear. Lift the grid, pull out the leaves and silt, then run a hose down the pipe and watch it go.
How a soakaway stops working
A soakaway is a buried pit, filled with rubble or a plastic crate and wrapped in membrane, that lets water seep away into the surrounding soil. Older ones were often a hole of broken brick with no wrapping at all, and over twenty or thirty years silt washes into the gaps until the pit holds water rather than shedding it. The symptom is a downpipe that backs up in a long downpour, with a soft patch of lawn nearby that never quite dries.
The soil matters as much as the pit. Clay drains slowly whatever you bury in it, and hard, dry ground can refuse water for the first part of a storm. Readers who have moved somewhere hotter describe the same thing at a far larger scale: in the Arizona desert a summer cloudburst runs straight off sun-baked earth, and householders there end up calling water restoration specialists in Mesa once the runoff has found its way under a door. A garden soakaway is the small domestic version of that problem, and it only works where the ground is willing to accept water.
Test before you dig
Before replacing a soakaway, test it. Fill the inspection chamber if there is one, or run a hose into the pipe for a measured ten minutes, and note how long the level takes to fall. A pit that empties within a day of heavy rain is doing its job. One still brimming the next morning has silted up or was always too small, and its replacement belongs at least five metres from any foundation.
Cheap measures that help
A water butt on each downpipe takes the edge off the opening minutes of a storm, and a diverter fitted to the pipe sends overflow back down once the butt fills, so it never spills against the wall. Where a pipe ends over a hard surface, an extension carrying the water a metre or two away, onto ground that falls from the house, costs very little and works well.
If water still collects at the base of a wall after every storm once all of this is done, the drainage itself wants a proper survey with a camera, because a cracked pipe underground gives no other warning until the damage shows.
Most outside maintenance comes down to keeping water moving somewhere useful. At the foot of a wall that stops being a tidy principle and starts to matter, because it is the only place where the garden and the inside floor sit a few courses of brick apart.
Find the barrier before you do anything
Look along the brickwork roughly a hand's width above the soil for a thin dark line running through one mortar joint, or a band of slate on anything built before the war. That line is the barrier holding ground moisture out of the wall above. Below it, the brick is meant to be wet. Above it, dry. The entire arrangement rests on one condition: the outside ground must stay lower than the line.
What defeats it is rarely dramatic. A border gets a barrow of compost every spring. A path is laid on top of the tired one rather than lifted and replaced. Gravel goes down around a bed to stop the weeds. Two or three inches gained over a decade will bury that barrier, and a buried barrier is simply bypassed, with moisture travelling up into plaster that was never meant to receive it.
If it has already come inside
Prevention and aftermath are separate jobs. Skirtings that have swollen, a carpet wet along one edge, a smell in a room that has been shut up for a week: at that point the question is no longer the garden, it is drying the fabric of the building out properly and in the right order. For readers in the States writing in about exactly that, a firm handling flood damage cleanup in Dallas sets out the sequence sensibly, and the order genuinely matters more than the equipment does.
Airbricks have to breathe
A suspended timber floor stays sound because air crosses underneath it. Those small vents at low level are the whole ventilation system for that void, and they are easy to lose: buried by a raised bed, rendered across during a repair, painted shut, or blocked by a new patio laid at the wrong height. Count yours and clear them. If one is below the finished ground level now, it wants a periscope vent rather than a shrug, because a sealed void under a wooden floor is how joist ends rot out of sight.
Render, paths and the small details
Render carried down over the barrier and onto the footing gives water a bridge across it, which is why a neat skirt of render at the base of a wall often sits above the dampest plaster indoors. Cut it back and leave the joint open.
Paths want a fall away from the house of about one in eighty, and a gap of ten or fifteen millimetres against the wall rather than mortar packed tight into the joint.
When to stop
Plaster blown in a band above the skirting, a tide mark that returns after decorating, or any smell of must in a room with a timber floor are all past routine work. Those want investigating before anything is replastered, because replastering a wall whose ground level is wrong simply hides the evidence for a season.
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