How to check your fascia without getting on a ladder
A five-minute check from the ground that tells you whether your fascia is sound, using nothing but your eyes and a screwdriver. No ladder required.
Free quotes, usually the same day. Tell us what you are looking at and we pass it straight to a local crew.
Fascia rot is expensive mostly because it is found late. The board fails behind the gutter, where the gutter is bolted to it, and by the time there is anything to see from the street it has been wet for two or three seasons. Here is how to get ahead of that in about five minutes, from the ground, safely.
Look along the gutter, not up at it. This is the single most useful thing in this guide. Stand at one corner of the house and sight down the length of the gutter run the way you would sight down a plank for a bow. A gutter hung on sound fascia is dead straight. What you are looking for is a sag in the middle of a run, a section that has rotated so you can see more of the inside of the trough than you should, or a gap opening between the back of the gutter and the board at one end.
All three mean the same thing: the fasteners are no longer biting into solid wood. Gutters do not sag because they are heavy. They sag because the thing they are screwed to has gone soft.
Look for vertical staining on the siding. Walk the perimeter and look at the wall directly under each end of each gutter run. A dark streak running down the siding is water that has been coming over the back of the gutter and down the wall, which means it has also been running down the fascia behind the gutter on its way. This is the cheapest early warning available and almost nobody looks for it.
Look at the bottom edge of the board. Most fascia failure starts along the bottom edge, because that is where water collects and where the paint film is thinnest. From the ground with the sun at a low angle you can often see swelling, a furry or fibrous texture, or a line where the paint has lifted. On hardboard trim, which is what most Woodstock houses built in the nineties have, the bottom edge mushrooms and thickens rather than simply cracking.
Then probe it. Anywhere you can safely reach from the ground or from a short step ladder on level ground, push a screwdriver or an awl firmly into the board, along the bottom edge and at the joints between boards. Sound wood resists and leaves a mark. Rotten wood takes the tip with almost no pressure, and rotten hardboard feels like dense wet cardboard. Do this under the worst gutter first, which is whichever one has the most tree cover over it.
Check the soffit from underneath. Stand under the overhang and look up. Staining, a panel that has dropped slightly out of plane, or daylight visible at the joint between the soffit and the fascia all matter. Daylight in particular is worth acting on: that is how squirrels and wasps get into the attic, and it is the clearest sign the corner has already failed.
What each result means. Straight gutters, sound probe, clean soffit: you are fine, and the useful thing to do is clear the gutters and get the trim painted before the question comes back. Soft spots in one or two places: this is a section repair, the cheapest version of this job, and doing it now rather than next year is the difference between replacing a board and replacing a board plus the rafter tails behind it. Sagging gutters with soft board along a whole run: that elevation needs quoting.
What not to do. Do not get on the roof. Nothing in this inspection requires it and roofline work is where the falls happen. Do not lean a ladder against the gutter to look more closely, because if the fascia behind it has gone soft the gutter will not hold you. And do not let a symptom of something else send you down this path: a stained soffit panel is frequently a roof flashing problem, not a trim problem, and replacing the panel fixes nothing.
If you do find soft board, take photographs while you are out there with the location of each one noted. That turns a vague estimate into a specific one, and it makes it much harder for anyone to quote you a whole roofline when three sections have failed.
More like this
- Why Woodpeckers Are Drilling Your Fascia
- Why Your Gutters Are Pulling Away
- Wood, Hardboard, PVC or Fiber Cement?
- Soffit and Fascia: What to Fix Yourself
- How Animals Get Into Your Attic
- When Fascia Repair Becomes a Roof Job
- Rotted Wood Behind Your Gutters: What It Costs
- Water Runs Behind the Gutter Instead of Into It
Services
When the board needs fixing rather than reading about, the soffit and fascia repair in Woodstock, GA page covers what a repair visit looks like and what it costs.
Common questions
Can I check without getting on a ladder?
Partly. From the ground with binoculars you can see staining below the gutter line, paint peeling at the joints, and any sag in what should be a straight run. What you cannot do from down there is the screwdriver test, and that is the one that settles it, so it is worth having someone competent go up.
How do I measure my roofline to get a rough price?
Measure along the ground below each run of gutter and add the runs together, which is close enough for an estimate. A typical single-story Woodstock house has roughly 120 to 150 linear feet of fascia, and a two-story with dormers runs 180 to 250. You only need to measure the sections that have actually failed, not the whole house.
Why does fascia rot so quickly in this part of Cherokee County?
Because the subdivisions were cut out of standing loblolly pine and the builders left as many trees as the plans allowed. Pine needles mat in the gutters rather than washing through, the standing water rises above the back lip, and it spills down the strip of fascia hidden behind the gutter, which is the one part of the board that never gets repainted. Heavy tree cover also keeps the roofline from drying between storms.
My house was built in the nineties. What is my trim made of?
Almost certainly hardboard, which was the standard exterior trim across the southeast from around 1985 to 2000 and covers most of the Towne Lake area. It is compressed wood fiber with a factory primer. It fails by swelling and delaminating at the bottom edge and at butt joints once the paint film cracks, which looks quite different from the way real wood rots.
Free quotes, usually the same day. Tell us what you are looking at and we pass it straight to a local crew.