Our first foray into gutters

I knew summer couldn't last, but those 70 degree October days had me fooled, for a while at least. But the time has come and, while I love a good bout of denial, it won't stop winter from coming. So, we've been trying to button down the hatches a bit here at the house in preparation.

One thing we've been trying to fix, unsucessfully so far, is the leak in our garage. See the "shop" part of the garage was probably an add-on to the original garage. And while we love it for the extra space, we don't love the fact that where the two roofs join there's been a leak we can't seem to fix.

And it all came to a head when that leaky roof leaked on our new table saw, causing it to rust up quite badly. :( (it's ok, we think we can buff it out, but still, sad)

So, since we've tried a number of times to fix the leak by fixing the roof with silicon and all other sorts of leak stopping measures, we finally decided we needed bigger guns. Enter the indoor gutter. Yes, you heard me right, we put a gutter up inside our garage. Overkill? Maybe. White trashy? Maybe a little. But at least the roof doesn't leak on our stuff anymore.

So, decision made, we got going making it as pretty as we could. We went to menards and bought a bunch of bits of gutter and then glued them together one at a time. First we attached the downspout and a bit of extra gutter (since they don't sell 12 foot stretches and even if they did we couldn't fit it in the truck)

And here's the complete gutter. Then we just had to attach it to the garage wall.

The problem there is that unlike other parts of the roof, there wasn't really anything to attach it to. So we sort of created one by attaching the gutter to a 2x4 (above) and then putting up some more 2x4s along the overhang to support the gutter.

 

And voila! we have a gutter. Then the only part left was to rig up the downspout.

Now since this gutter would be draining inside the garage, we had to figure out a way to collect the water. So we ran the downspout down a wall and into a trashcan.

Works like a charm :)

Now, we still have a small problem with the roof leaking in over by where the downspout is, but that runs down the wall and won't get on much but the wall. A problem for another day, for sure, but at least our stuff is now protected.