Picture story time. If you have a roof section where a third of the roof drains past the chimney to this:
And that pours straight onto about the only area of the house that gets no sun, and that area is enclosed by the chimney and the deck railing,
and the deck it drips onto is poorly drained because the builder put netting under the planks (presumably some attempt to stop bugs, but actually caught 20 years plus of dirt), then you get this:
Rotten siding, but more concerning is when that water gets behind the siding, runs down and hits the sill (where the wood structure meets the concrete foundation):
See that gap? There's supposed to be a length of wood there, holding the freaking house up. Over time, water, and subsequent insect invasion has resulted in this - not even a rotting piece of wood, but no wood remaining whatsoever. Luckily the rest of the span seems to be taking the load. Now if only a simple piece of guttering had been installed:
then perhaps all of this could have been avoided. Combine this with the fact that the other section of roof had gutters that were so poorly installed that most of the water ran down behind them, you can begin to account for the poor quality of the siding and paint on the rear of our house. Some guttering later and three tubes of caulk we should have begun to fix the cause of the rot, now to fix the damage....
