Water coming down behind the gutter is a wood problem, not a gutter problem
Water coming down behind a gutter rather than into it means a missing gutter apron or a dropped gutter. Both rot the board, and both are fixable.
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You stand at the window in a storm and see water sheeting down the wall behind the gutter, or dripping from under it in a steady line, while the gutter itself looks empty enough. It is a small thing that does real damage, because every drop of it is running across wood that was never meant to get wet.
The usual cause is a missing gutter apron. Water leaving a roof does not fall cleanly off the edge. It clings to the underside of the last shingle and follows it back toward the house, which is exactly where the top of the fascia is. A gutter apron is a bent strip of metal that tucks under the shingles and hangs over the gutter lip, giving that water nowhere to go but down. Plenty of Woodstock houses were built without one, and on those the fascia has been taking roof runoff since the day it went up.
The second cause is a gutter that has dropped. Hangers pull loose, the gutter tips away from the house at the top, and a gap opens between the back of the gutter and the board. Water then runs into the gap rather than the trough. This one usually gets worse quickly, because the wood it is now soaking is the wood holding the hangers.
How to tell which you have. Look at the back edge of the gutter from a ladder during or just after rain. If the gutter is tight to the board and water is still appearing behind it, the apron is missing or the drip edge is wrong. If there is a visible gap, or the gutter leans out at the top, it is the hangers and the wood behind them.
What it costs to put right. Adding an apron along a run is inexpensive on its own and nearly free if a crew is already taking the gutter down for other work, which is the argument for doing both at once. Rehanging a dropped gutter is cheap if the board is sound and is not a repair at all if it is not, because there is nothing solid to hang it from.
Do not ignore it because it is only a trickle. The volume is not the problem. A steady, repeated wetting of one strip of wood that never gets sun or airflow is exactly the condition rot needs, and the board it is wetting is the one the gutter depends on. This is the cheapest stage of this problem you will ever see it at.
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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
Is a gutter apron the same as drip edge?
They do a similar job at the same edge and the names get used loosely. Drip edge is the metal along the roof edge that keeps water off the decking; a gutter apron extends far enough to carry that water over the gutter lip. A roof can have drip edge and still need an apron, which catches people out.
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.
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