Building your home? (Guttering, drains and floods)

Jun 19, 2011 News

By Leonard Gildarie

On Friday, last, the country received good news. At least for the building industry it is.
Barama Company Limited, the maker of plywood locally, announced that it has restarted production after about eight months. The company’s boiler at Land of Canaan went down last October, effectively shutting down operations.
Plywood is one of the more popular of building materials used for constructing walls, ceilings, and to form designs. It is also heavily favoured by furniture makers.
In the interim, consumers were forced to make do with imported plywood – which is more expensive – and other substitutes.
It will be good news for home builders that Barama has restarted production and that supplies will be stabilised in weeks.
This week, we will be relatively brief.
Someone wrote us last week about problems with drainage from their roof to the yard.
This is an extremely important aspect that many contractors overlook or fail to advise homeowners about. It makes absolutely no sense to build a solid foundation and spend millions to beautify your place then thoughtlessly allow rainwater to cascade perilously close to your walls.
Many folks, because of money constraints and other factors, would hurry to complete the inside of the home and leave the exterior for later. We know that sometimes getting around to completing this could take years.
Drainage not only protects your foundation, but bad drainage can breed flies and mosquitoes and worse yet, in my books, look unsightly.
Some persons, to cut costs, would try to use the six-inch PVC pipes for guttering. I would not recommend it. It looks neat and attractive but it just cannot take the volume of water that the roof would release. What will happen is that the ends will loose from the pressure and worse yet, if it is raining very hard, will actually spill over these makeshift gutters.
I would suggest using the normal PVC gutters. It works.
Now many homeowners do a couple of things with the rainwater from the roof. Because of the cost of pumping water, more and more persons are finding it convenient to have the gutters attached to those black water tanks. It should be covered properly to minimise mosquitoes hanging around there.
But other individuals prefer to have the water run off into drains.
If you are going for a concrete yard, more and more people are placing the PVC pipes in the ground then covering it with concrete. The gutters are channeled to these drains. I like it. The only problem is that you would have to build, at intervals, grates or access holes, so that you can clean the debris that will build up.
If you don’t have drains and no fence, then plan early on how to get rid of the rainwater. If your house is painted, it will cause a costly mess, after awhile.
In a nutshell, proper guttering is as important as many other aspects of that beautiful home of yours.

See you next week.
For those who want to read the series of articles you can visit our website: https://www.kaieteurnewsonline.com. Click on Features, scroll down to Columnists and look under Guyanese Literature.
In the meantime, have a pleasant week and keep writing to us at [email protected] or call 225-8491.

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