Rain Gutter Cleaning by Maintenance Worker

With all the water damage that happens to our buildings, resulting in high refurbishment bills to unit owners, it is apparent that a cost-effective and important maintenance item is keeping our rain gutters fully functional. Yet, in all the years that I've lived here I have never seen our maintenance staff clean out a rain gutter. 

I was happy to get these pictures from the Property Management of a maintenance worker engaged in the arduous and important work of cleaning out the gutters on building 47.  Now, only 46 buildings left to do!

Roofing Repair, Building 40

Degraded Metal Conduit From Tennis Courts

Related to a previous report of tennis court maintenance, this is a photo of the actual conduit that was replaced.

Tennis Court Lighting

A unit owner recently reported that the tennis court lights have not been coming on and going off appropriately.  The TAJ maintenance crew is responding to the complaint and the preliminary suspicion is that the timer may have been affected by our recent weather with heavy lightening.

Unit owners might be interested to know that the property manager reported that several months ago the tennis court lights were worked on by an electrician.  It apparently took him a significant number of days to troubleshoot the causes of the lighting problems and then rewire the poles to comply with local building code.  The lights have been fully functional since April 2014.

Tennis court lighting contributes to property security.  On the other hand, the longer the lights are on, the higher the TAJ electricity bill will be. 

Rain Gutter Maintenance

One cause of building decay is water intrusion. In fact, it MIGHT be the single biggest problem that our buildings have.  To address that problem, some buildings have over-hanging eaves.  Some of the buildings without eaves have been fitted with rain gutters.  The problem with rain gutters is that they clog and need to be manually cleaned in order to be effective. A clogged rain gutter is no better than no gutter at all.  Even gutters with covers get clogged. The gutters on the back of my own unit need to be cleaned almost monthly or they clog to the point of being ineffective, in spite of having covers on them.

I would think that it would be a fairly simple, if mundane, task for the maintenance crew to clean the gutters from time to time.  They have a cherry picker that could easily reach.  I know there are gutter cleaning services in the community that we could hire to do the job.  I happen to know that there are young men in our TAJ community that are seeking summer employment -- maybe we should pay THEM to clean the gutters. Climbing up and down a 30' ladder and earning some money is good for a young man.

Whatever the case, ignoring the problem now because it is small and inconvenient means huge damage and expenses later.

TAJ Equipment

In order to accommodate all the construction and maintenance needs associated with the multiple construction projects around the property, TAJ has acquired some great pieces of equipment.  Golf carts are cool, but I really love the John-Deere-green utility carts.  The cherry-pickers must be incredibly useful (until they get a flat tire, I suppose).

Steel Beams Instead of Rotted Wood

Many of the buildings were built with a beam of laminated wood for a major structural support of the second floor walls.  Because of water intrusion, that wood rots and becomes very expensive to replace.  Today I noticed that the current construction is replacing rotted beams with steel girders.  What a great idea. I was also told that the steel was less expensive than the wood. Double good!

Under Construction

There are a whole lot of projects going on around the TAJ property, and thank goodness.  

Recent Repairs, Still Incomplete (Building 33)

Recently, the southwest corner of building 33's upper story was rebuilt. It looks to me like the job was done quite well.  However, they neglected to do anything to repair the rain gutter that was broken in the process. It is the very same issue the caused the problems in the first place. 

The difference a tree trimming can make...

Thank you to the Property Manager and to Ted Conner Tree Experts for the great job they did in trimming the three trees behind building 40, and also for the superb job they did in cleaning up after themselves.

Rain Gutter Problems for Building 33

Rain gutters have been added to some buildings as a really good measure to help prevent water intrusion damage.  However, the rain gutters themselves do require some maintenance.  In the case of building 33, pictured below, it is clear that the gutter is so full of leaves and or debris (in spite of leaf guards having been installed) that the water is running over the top of the gutter and down the side rather than down the spout (06 August 2011 rainstorm).  That particular downspout also has problems, in that the away-tube portion has never been installed and a rather large hole has grown, from rain-water erosion, at the back corner of that building's foundation.  There are some simple solutions that can be applied.  But there are multiple such problems around the property that have existed for several years and have not been addressed.  Previous posts on this subject can be found by clicking this link: (Other rain gutter posts: rain gutters)

                

It is too bad that the tree trimmers didn't clean out the gutters while they were right there (on 04 August 2011) with the lift equipment that would make it an easy and fast task to accomplish.

The Clubhouse Gets New Doors

The Clubhouse now has new doors, with impact resistant glass.  It is nice to see improvements when they happen in our neighborhood.

How Long Did It Take?

Nevermind. The tree got trimmed some way other than waiting for the management office and maintenance crew to respond to my request to have the tree pruned to remove an obstruction to my wife's vehicle.

Let Your Light Shine...

The President of the BOD had promised that the light would be fixed. Years of disappointment had convinced me that it would never happen. But now I want to say THANK YOU to both W2ndi H1ll and the TAJ management and maintenance crew for fixing the light between buildings 35 & 36. It has been since Hurricane Wilma, in October of 2005, that our street looked like the picture below left. But this past week the maintenance crew did the hard manual labor necessary to bring the illumination, below right.

What the Heck?

What's going on, on 9th court? The sign on the fire hydrant reads:

DO NOT TURN OFF
WATER QUALITY MAINTENANCE
IN PROGRESS

Building Maintenance Issue: Rain gutters

You might recognize this picture from an earlier post. It shows the damage that happens to our buildings when we do not adequately protect them from water intrusion. This picture of building 27 shows that the water had leaked through the stucco, rotted through the underlying plywood sheathing, rotted through the insulation, rotted several 2x4s, and had even rotted some of the paper off of the outside of the interior drywall. Damage that extensive is very expensive to repair, and even more so when it is involves replacing supportive trusses that have been rotted. The finding of rotted underlying materials has been a very common theme in our building refurbishments, resulting in very costly change-orders.

To address the problem of water intrusion, our buildings have all been given rain gutters when they are refurbished. Unfortunately, building 35 had one gutter that was perpetually clogged by leaves from the nearby trees. Those same trees clogged the rain gutters of buildings 33 & 40, also. In the pictures below (building 35 on the left, 33 on the right) you can see that clogged gutters do little to protect the walls of a building. When I noticed this problem, I made my first request (August 2007) for the installation of leaf guards.

I was pleased when I noticed that buildings 33 and 40 got the needed leaf guards installed. Their rain gutters now functioned perfectly, moving the water away from the walls and down the downspouts where it cannot rot the buildings' wood. But I was very displeased to find that building 35 did not have the leaf guards installed. I compared the downspout productivity of the two buildings (pictured below, building 35 left, 33 right) and immediately suffered from downspout envy! I wanted my gutters to work as well as my neighbors. So I asked the Property Manager and made my concerns made known to the Board of Directors. My building remained without leaf guards.

The Board of Directors eventually did send out a notice, in September 2008, that they intended to make assessments and install leaf guards on buildings that needed them. The assessment for building 35 would have been $864.00 (6 x $144.00). Unfortunately, that special assessment did not happen, and the leaf guards did not happen.

In all fairness, you may recall that the Board of Directors at that time was involved with mid-term re-election turmoil and associated controversies. They were also in the process of straightening out some very difficult financial and accounting problems. By comparison, leaf guards can seem like a very small issue. Nonetheless, I think that building maintenance is too easily overlooked and dangerously forgotten. So I made another request for leaf guards in March 2009.

The response that I got was that the maintenance men occasionally climbed ladders to the roofs and scooped out the leaves that clogged the gutters. The problem with that is that it did not work. Clogs reoccurred too quickly.

So eventually I bought leaf guards myself. Eight three-foot lengths cost a grand total of less than $16.00 at the local hardware store (pictured left, below). Click on the picture (below, right) to enlarge it and look closely, and you can see the leaf guard installed on the left side of the gutter on the back of building 35.

Now building 35 no longer suffers from downspout envy. The pictures below show the output during a recent daytime downpour. Both buildings 35 (below, left) and 33 (below, right) have leaf guards, fully functioning downspouts, and relatively dry walls during heavy rains. The problem was solved for a small fraction of the proposed price. Building 35 saved $848.00 in the cost of leaf guard installation. More importantly, it will save itself thousands of dollars by protecting itself from the inevitable rot that happens when water intrudes through a building's siding.

One purpose of maintenance is to spend a little money now to avoid spending more money later. Building 40 is a great example of that principle. In the picture below you can see the water streaming down a corner on the back of building 40. The downspout has fallen off and the water is just streaming right down the stucco, searching for any crack or hole. It would cost a little labor and maybe even a few dollars in material to reinstall a downspout. It is the kind of job our maintenance men can perform quite easily. If it is not done, the cost to building 40 will eventually be much higher when the siding and underlying structural materials have to be replaced.