Another not-so-exciting improvement accomplished while my Dad was here was the replacement of the old gutters on the garage. They were of the semicylindrical, thin-metal kind and were sagging and leaking in several places. The metal itself was sufficiently corroded that replacing the whole thing seemed like the best option. (Not to mention that we were unable to find spare parts anywhere.) Gutters these days are overwhelmingly vinyl, and the brown option kind of match the brown on the house pretty well.

The new gutters. Instead of the cast-iron pipe the old ones discharged into, we mounted a 3″ PVC pipe along the wall.

We also took the opportunity to replace the cast-iron riser that came 7 ft out of the concrete and probably weighed 150 pounds. We just cut it with the angle grinder and routed the new PVC pipe into the hole.

This isn’t exactly pretty but routing the pipe around the corner and into the hole where the old pipe ran wasn’t trivial.

Finally, the discharge on the other side was improved. There used to be two PVC pipes (the one from garage roof and also one from one side of the addition) terminating about 2ft up the garage wall here, dumping the water into the planter bed. During moderately heavy rainfall, the planter bed would turn into a pool. Since you don’t really want standing water against the concrete, we extended the pipe all the way down through the planter bed and through the outside. Now the water dumps into the gravel there, but we have the option of hooking it up to the drain pipe from the driveway, when I get around to adding that.

The drains from the garage (on the left) and the roof over the addition now go into a pipe and out through the wall of the planter box.

There’s something strangely satisfying about building water transport systems. (And there’s a lot of opportunity for that living in Hilo…) I guess it’s like the grown-up version of building dams in ditches. (Everyone did that as a kid, right?)