Fascia & Soffit Rot Repair · Cambridge

Fascia and Soffit Rot Repair in Cambridge

On a century home the eavestrough is rarely the thing that has failed. The wood behind it is, and a new trough screwed into soft fascia is a one-winter repair.

Fascia is the board along the roof edge the trough hangs from; soffit is the underside of the overhang. On Cambridge's older housing both are solid wood — often decorative on the Victorian and Edwardian houses of Dickson Hill, old Galt and Preston's King Street blocks — and both have spent a hundred years directly behind troughs that overflowed, leaked at the seams and dripped at the ends. The pattern of rot is predictable: soft at the corners, soft below every old downspout outlet, soft where a valley dumps onto one spot, and sometimes gone entirely at a rafter tail. None of it can be judged from the lawn, and most of it cannot be seen until the trough is off.

How the assessment is done

With the old trough down, every metre of fascia and soffit is probed with an awl. The quote then separates three things: boards that must be replaced, boards that are sound and can be capped or repainted, and boards that are fine and are left alone. On a typical Galt house that is usually a few sections at the corners and under the outlets rather than the whole eave, which is why probing before quoting matters — a blanket replacement price is almost always more than the house needs.

Replace, cap or paint

• Replacement is for wood that is soft, split or delaminating. The section comes out, the rafter tails behind are checked, and new board goes in. Where the original fascia has a moulded or decorative profile, the new piece is matched as closely as practical.
• Aluminum capping wraps sound fascia in pre-finished metal bent on site. It stops the maintenance painting and gives new hangers a clean face. It is not a cure for rot: capped mush is still mush and hangers will pull out of it.
• Keeping painted wood is sometimes the right answer. On a designated house or one in the Blair Village, Dickson Hill or Main Street Heritage Conservation Districts, aluminum capping over an original profile may not be appropriate and may need the City's heritage staff to weigh in. Sound wood, properly primed and painted with the drip edge corrected, lasts a long time.

Soffit and the ice at the eave

Old plank or bead-board soffit was often built closed, with no intake venting, and many of these houses have since had insulation added that fills the eave. The attic cannot breathe, warm air collects at the deck, snow melts from below and refreezes at the cold edge, and the eavestrough fills with ice every winter. Where appearance allows, closed soffit is replaced with vented aluminum soffit; where the original soffit is to be kept, discreet vents can be let into it and baffles installed to keep the insulation off the roof deck. Either way the eavestrough stops being the thing that pays for a ventilation problem.

What is outside the lane

Fascia and soffit repair does not normally need a permit. Rot that has reached the rafter tails or the roof framing is structural work for a carpenter and a question for the City's building division, and if that is what the probe finds, the quote says so plainly rather than covering it with capping.

Frequently asked questions

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