Stand in the yard and sight down the length of your gutter the way you would sight down a board at the lumber yard. It should read as a straight line, dropping very slightly toward the downspout. What most people see instead is a shallow smile: high at both ends, dipping somewhere in the middle, […]
Sagging Gutters: What Is Actually Holding Them Up Read More »
There is a spot on the front of a house in Martinez where the paint has been peeling in the same two-foot patch for three years. It is directly under an outside corner of the gutter. Everywhere else on that elevation, the gutter is fine. It has held water through every storm since it went
Why Gutters Leak at the Corners and Hardly Anywhere Else Read More »
By the last week of March, everything in the CSRA has a yellow green film on it. The cars, the porch railing, the dog, the water in the birdbath. Pine pollen season here is not subtle, and most people handle it by waiting it out and then washing the visible things once it is over.
What Augusta’s Pollen Season Does to Screens and Gutters Read More »
A family in Martinez finished a screened porch in April and spent most of the spring out there. By the middle of June they had an extension cord running across the floor from the kitchen, a floor lamp in the corner because the one overhead bulb was too dim to read by, and a box
Planning Lights and Outlets Before You Build, Not After Read More »
A homeowner in Evans called about a strip of yard behind her house that stayed soft and muddy weeks into the dry part of summer. She had new gutters. She had guards on them. The gutters were doing their job, catching everything off the roof and carrying it to the corners the way they were
Where Your Gutter Water Actually Goes After It Leaves the Downspout Read More »
A couple in Grovetown had a paver patio they liked well enough but barely used after about 7pm most evenings, once the mosquitoes showed up and the citronella candles stopped being worth the trouble. They weren’t looking to build something new. They just wanted their existing patio to actually get used in the evenings the
How a Screen Room Changes What You Actually Do With an Existing Patio Read More »
A homeowner who’d moved to Augusta from Ohio a couple years back called us confused about why her wood pergola looked weathered already, when the one at her previous house had gone years between refinishing. She’d been following the same maintenance schedule she always had. The schedule was the problem. What works for wood sitting
Why Your Wood Pergola Needs Different Care in an Augusta Summer Than It Did Up North Read More »
A homeowner in North Augusta called us excited about an outdoor kitchen he’d been planning for months. He had the layout sketched out, a grill picked out, even tile samples for the counter. What he hadn’t thought about yet was where the gas line would run, whether his existing electrical panel had room for another
What an Outdoor Kitchen Actually Needs Before You Build One Read More »
A homeowner in Evans told us she’d added up every renovation project on her house and expected her appraisal to reflect roughly what she’d spent. It didn’t, not for the screened porch anyway. The kitchen remodel showed up almost dollar for dollar. The porch barely moved the number. She wasn’t wrong to expect a return.
Does a Screened Porch Raise Your Home’s Appraisal, or Just Its Asking Price? Read More »
Someone asked us last week whether we could “just enclose” their existing concrete patio. Simple enough question. Except “enclose” can mean about four different things, and the right answer depends entirely on what they actually want to do with the space once it’s closed in. That’s the part people searching for “patio enclosures” usually haven’t
Patio Enclosures: What You’re Actually Choosing Between Read More »