3 Reasons Why Missing a Gutter Cleaning Can Ruin Your Foundation

Out of sight, out of mind. That's how most homeowners treat their gutters—until basement starts smelling musty. Your gutters have one job: to capture the thousands of gallons of water that hit your roof during a storm and divert it away from your house. When they are clogged with leaves, that system fails instantly.

1. The Foundation Trenches

When gutters overflow, water pours straight down like a waterfall directly onto the soil next to your foundation. This consistently wet soil expands and contracts, putting immense hydrostatic pressure on your concrete foundation walls.

Over time, this pressure causes cracks. Once a crack forms, water finds it immediately. What started as "lazy gutter maintenance" becomes a $10,000+ foundation waterproofing bill.

2. Landscape Destruction

You spend hundreds of dollars on mulch, shrubs, and flower beds around your home. An overflowing gutter acts like a pressure washer, blasting away your mulch and drowning your plants. It can expose roots and create unsightly mud pits right against your siding.

3. Pest Infestations

Damp, decomposing leaves inside a gutter are a 5-star hotel for insects. Mosquitoes breed in the standing water. Carpenter ants and termites love the moist conditions at the roofline. Once they establish a colony in your gutters, it's a short walk under the shingles and into your attic framing.

The Solution: Twice a Year

We recommend a professional cleaning twice annually:

• Late Spring: To remove "helicopters" (seeds), blossoms, and pollen strings that clog downspouts.
• Late Autumn: To remove the bulk of fallen leaves before winter freezes them into a solid block of ice (which causes ice dams!).