Gutter repair and installation in Fox Chapel, PA

Gutters in Fox Chapel

Fox Chapel is mostly houses from the 1920s through the 1970s, spread out on big lots along Fox Chapel Road, Squaw Run Road and the streets running up from the Allegheny. The older estates were built with slate roofs, copper gutters and copper downspouts, and those systems are worth maintaining rather than replacing. The 1950s–70s houses — mid-century ranches and split-levels around the Fox Chapel Golf Club, the newer streets off Dorseyville Road — mostly have original aluminum that is now past fifty and due for seamless replacement.

Two things make gutter work here different from the city. The roofs are big: a rambling one-story on a two-acre lot can put 1,500 square feet of roof onto a single rear run, which needs 6-inch gutter and two 3x4 downspouts, not the 5-inch and one 2x3 the builder fitted. And the trees are everywhere. Red and pin oaks, sugar maples, tulip poplars and hemlocks in the ravines mean the gutters fill twice a year, and a wet oak-leaf plug at the first freeze is how a gutter ends up on the lawn in January.

What we do here

• Gutter repair — corners, sagging long runs, ice-dam damage on the north-facing eaves, downspouts.
• Seamless installation — 6-inch aluminum on the big mid-century roofs; copper on the estates, quoted separately.
• Box gutter and slate work — the 1920s houses with built-in gutters and slate, relined in copper or EPDM.
• Gutter guards — micro-mesh under the oaks and maples. Fox Chapel is where guards most reliably pay for themselves.
• Gutter cleaning — twice a year, three under hemlocks.

Copper on the older houses

A copper gutter that has gone green and dark is doing its job, and a copper system on a 1920s Fox Chapel house is usually fifty years from needing replacement. What does fail is the solder at the seams and the outlets, the straps on the downspouts, and any spot where a previous crew used a steel screw or an aluminum patch — dissimilar metals corrode each other. We repair copper with copper, resolder seams, and replace only the sections that are actually gone. A quote to tear out copper and hang aluminum on one of these houses is a quote to lower its value.

The hillside lot

Most Fox Chapel lots slope, often steeply toward a ravine. Where a downspout dumps on the uphill side of the house, the water runs along the foundation to the low corner and into the basement; where it dumps on the downhill side, it erodes the slope. We extend or pipe downspouts to a point where the water leaves the house and the slope both, and on lots where nothing surfaces well we run a buried line to a pop-up emitter or a dry well. The downspouts and foundations post explains why the county's clay and shale make this matter more than it would on sand.

Pricing in Fox Chapel

Repairs $150–$600; seamless aluminum $9–$15 per foot, 6-inch at the upper end; copper $35–$60 per foot; micro-mesh guards $10–$18 per foot; cleaning quoted by house size, with large homes over the standard $120–$300 range. A two-story colonial off Fox Chapel Road with 240 feet of 6-inch gutter and seven downspouts is typically $3,000–$3,900 in aluminum. The pricing page has the rest.

Nearby

We also cover O'Hara Township, Aspinwall, Sharpsburg, Blawnox and Indiana Township from the same crew. Zip codes 15238 and 15215.