Although a lot of my work is in Los Gatos, Cambrian Park, Saratoga, and Almaden Valley, I do have buyer and seller clients all over San Jose and Silicon Valley. One of my buyers is interested in neighborhoods close to downtown San Jose such as Japantown, the Vendome area, and Naglee Park.

This week we saw a classic, historic Spanish style home that offered a lot of "old San Jose" charm.  It was partially updated and remodeled but there were a few red flags and odd things about the home.

One of the oddities involved the roof, downspouts and gutters.  Here's a view of the back end of that home.  Please note the downspout in the center of the photo (it meanders around the window with a large catch-basin at the top). 

Do you see anything amiss?  If not, have a look again with my annotated version:

The home was re-roofed a number of years ago, with permits and finals - but without gutters.

Do gutters and downspouts matter all that much? You bet they do. For more information on that topic, please read "Cracked Foundations, Adobe Clay Soils and Water in Silicon Valley" on my ValleyOfHeartsDelight.com blog.

Winter is a great time for dirt, leaves, and other debris to pile up in your rain gutters. Leave it long enough and there will be buildup.  Leave it a really long time and those bits of dust, plantlife and other things will mush together and decompose, eventually becoming plant-worthy soil.  Add a few seeds and some rain, and before you know it, green sprouts are popping up on your roof.

Today I passed a home in Los Gatos in which this seems to have happened.  Grass and weeds were sprouting out of the rain gutters and had crept onto the roof quite a few inches.

Why is this a problem? Because the more you grow things on the roof, the more moisture you have getting trapped up there and the faster the roof decomposes.  You don't want things like fungus and dry rot to munch away at your home, but having plants grow on your roof is going to lead to exactly that.

Keep your gutters clean so problems like this do not have a chance to start.  It is infinely easier to prevent this than to cure it.

(Not a great photo - taken with my treo's camera and enlarged to show the roof but trying to keep the house itself anonymous.)