Home improvements part 2: Guttering
As mentioned in part one, it rains heavily in Austin. I noticed during the first couple of winters that water would pour in sheets off of the front and back roofs, and pound onto the steps up to the decks. It wasn’t long before the paint in the splash zones peeled away. I sanded down, primed, and repainted, and a year later it had been pounded away again. The problem wasn’t hard to diagnose: the house had no guttering, and the shape of the roof was basically funneling water towards the deck roofs, and hence to the decks themselves–and particularly the steps.