Box Gutters For Historic Homes

If your historic house has box gutters you may find some of these common problems.

Box gutters for historic homes.

We also specialize in historical restoration projects. In wisconsin box gutters are also referred to as yankee gutters if your house has box gutters you should hire professional roofing contractors to repair them or install new ones. Often the old growth wood was rot resistant enough to perform admirably for decades and other times the gutters were lined with a sheet metal like lead or copper to extend their life. Many historic buildings use internal gutters instead of external ones.

Often called box gutters internal gutters are recessed troughs constructed in the plane of the roof near the eaves. This type of gutter is best suited for more traditional homes that are victorian or period homes but with the right styling of your home it can look great on most properties. Ask to see a full year s energy bills on the house before you buy. The later years were for more high style homes.

Most box gutters consist largely of wooden materials and have a metal lining in the bottom. Box gutters channel water to a metal flange at the end of the gutter trough and into a downspout. I work on a lot of historic homes in columbus and lancaster and most of these have either box gutters or step gutters. We can restore your present gutter system to its original design.

Simple wood gutters often called yankee gutters or box gutters have been around for a long time in one form or another. Box gutters most commonly exist in older and historic homes and may have problems that you can repair rather than replace the gutter system completely. They are shallow gutters which means they can t handle all of the water flow that other gutters can and so they work well on much smaller homes. Built in gutters date back to the time of the roman empire and have been used on homes through the 1940 s.

The box gutter system is not an add on attachment to the house but is actually a part of the roofing system itself. Though originally constructed of wood advances in construction practices made it standard to line them with metal often lead. As usual these beautiful gutters were neglected and then were frequently removed. Water leaking due to failed solder joints an eroded metal lining or holes caused by falling tree branches or hail damage.

If your box gutters are leaking the best way to fix them is to remove. It is not uncommon for historic homes to cost more to heat and cool because of restrictions such as single pane windows.