Gutters in St. Louis: a guide to repair, replacement, copper and guards

What St. Louis does to a gutter

Forty-one inches of rain a year is not extreme. What's hard on gutters in St. Louis is how it arrives. Spring brings hail and two-inch-an-hour thunderstorms out of the west; July drops the same rain in twenty minutes; and from December to February the temperature swings above and below freezing dozens of times a winter, so the water left in a badly pitched run freezes, expands, and pulls the sealant off every corner. Add a late-October sycamore and oak leaf drop that can fill a 5-inch gutter in a week, and a system that would last thirty years somewhere dry often gets about twenty here.

The houses make it more interesting. In the city — Tower Grove, Shaw, South Hampton, Holly Hills, the Central West End — the brick homes went up between 1900 and the 1950s with half-round gutters, and on the better streets those are copper. They're usually worth keeping, and plenty of gutter crews don't work on them. In West County, from Kirkwood and Ballwin out to Chesterfield and Wildwood, the subdivisions went up between 1960 and the 1990s and still carry the rain gutters St. Louis builders hung when the house was new. That metal is at the end of its life now, and the fascia behind it is often worse than the gutter.

Underneath all of it is clay over limestone and a basement. Almost every St. Louis home has one, finished or not, and the clay holds water against the wall for days after a storm, so a downspout dumping at the foundation wall is a very common reason a basement gets wet in April. The fix is often a $40 extension or a $300 buried line, not a $6,000 waterproofing job, which is why a good estimate always says where each downspout drains.

The main gutter jobs, explained

Repair — resealed corners and end caps, sagging runs re-hung on hidden hangers, crushed or separated downspouts replaced, missing straps, and the fascia rot that turns up behind all of it. Most repairs are $150–$600 and take a morning. The guide to gutter repair in St. Louis covers each job and when a repair will hold.

Installation and replacement — 5-inch or 6-inch aluminum formed on site from a coil, .032 gauge, hidden hangers into the rafter tails, 3x4 downspouts where the roof needs them. A typical 160-foot single-story ranch in Florissant or Ballwin is $1,600–$2,700; two-story West County homes run more. See gutter installation and replacement and the cost guide.

Copper and half-round gutters — repair, re-hang and replacement on the city's older brick homes, in copper or in aluminum half-round when copper isn't in the budget. The copper and half-round guide explains what's involved.

Gutter guards — micro-mesh, screen or reverse-curve, chosen for the trees you actually have. Sycamore and oak are not the same problem. The guards guide sorts it by tree.

Gutter cleaning — by hand, with the downspouts flushed and a ladder look at the hangers, corners and fascia. Typical prices by house size are on the cleaning guide.

Where this guide covers

The City of St. Louis and all of St. Louis County — Kirkwood, Webster Groves, Clayton, University City, Florissant, Ballwin, Chesterfield, Wildwood — plus St. Charles County. Newer St. Charles County subdivisions mostly need capacity fixes rather than gutter repair; O'Fallon, MO and St. Peters houses from the 1990s often have one undersized downspout per long run. Kirkwood and Chesterfield have their own guides because the houses there are different. Wherever you are, a call or estimate request from this site goes to an independent local contractor partner who looks at the gutters, writes the quote and performs the work.

Why September is a good month to call

The leaves haven't dropped yet and the ground hasn't frozen. A corner that leaked all summer can be resealed in an afternoon now; in November it's under six inches of sycamore leaves, and in January the sealant won't cure. The storm-season checklist is the ten-minute walk-around to do this week, and the fall leaf guide explains when the oaks in your neighborhood usually let go. If a storm has already pulled a run loose, photograph the damage yourself from the ground before anything is moved, and check your policy or ask your agent what it covers.