Gutter repair and box gutter relining in Hyde Park

Gutters in Hyde Park

The streets between Hyde Park Square and Ault Park — Observatory, Grandin, Erie, Paxton, Shaw, Edwards — are lined with foursquares, Tudors and Colonials built between 1905 and 1940, most under slate, most with built-in box gutters behind a wooden cornice. The original terne liners in those troughs have been failing since the 1980s. When one goes, the water doesn’t drip on the lawn; it soaks the cornice, runs down inside the brick, and appears as a stain on a second-floor ceiling. Half our Hyde Park calls start with a “roof leak” that a roofer couldn’t find.

The pin oaks and sugar maples the city planted along these streets in the 1920s are now 80 feet tall. They fill a box gutter trough with a leaf mat that holds water against the liner from November until March, and freeze-thaw does the rest. Mt. Lookout and the older streets of Oakley toward Madison Road have the same housing and the same problem.

The Hyde Park job

A typical visit: a 1925 foursquare on Observatory with 100 feet of box gutter, a stain on the northeast bedroom ceiling, and icicles hanging from the cornice every January. We open the trough at the stain, find the liner rusted through and the trough board soft for six feet, rebuild that section in new lumber, and reline the whole run in EPDM up under the slate. Two days, $5,000–$9,000 depending on how much wood is gone. The box gutter page explains each option and what it costs per foot.

Where the box gutter is past saving — the trough and the rafter tails both rotten — we rebuild the roof edge and hang half-round copper on cast brackets, which is what these houses look right with. That’s the installation page, quoted separately.

What we do here

• Box gutter repair and relining — EPDM or metal liners, trough rebuilds, internal downspouts
• Gutter repair — the aluminum on 1950s–80s additions, garages and porches; ice damage in March
• Seamless installation — half-round in copper or aluminum, K-style on the rear additions
• Gutter guards — stainless micro-mesh under the oaks; nothing on box gutters until the liner is sound
• Gutter cleaning — with an underground drain flush, because most of these downspouts drop into 100-year-old clay tile

The drain under the yard

Almost every house in Hyde Park has downspouts that disappear into the ground. Those lines run to the combined sewer and are as old as the house. When one collapses, the downspout backs up and water sits against the foundation on that corner. We flush every line with a hose during a cleaning or repair and tell you which ones are dead; a new line to daylight or a pop-up emitter is usually $300–$700 per downspout.

Historic district note

Parts of Hyde Park and the surrounding neighborhoods fall under local historic conservation rules. If yours does, exterior changes visible from the street — replacing a box gutter with a hanging gutter, say — may need a Certificate of Appropriateness from the Historic Conservation Board, though relining a box gutter as it is does not change the exterior. We’ll flag it before quoting.

Pricing in Hyde Park

Same rates as the rest of Cincinnati: repairs $150–$600, seamless aluminum $9–$14 per foot, box gutter relining $35–$75 per foot on sound wood, cleaning $120–$300 by house size. The cost page has the tables. Zip codes 45208 and 45209, plus Mt. Lookout, Oakley and East Walnut Hills.