Seriously, clean your gutters

I see it more often than I should when doing home inspections. I find some moisture in the block in a crawlspace or basement and more often than not I can walk strait around to that side of the house and find a full gutter that is leaking right or just up from that spot that has the moisture. Gutters are designed to take water that would run off the roof and direct them AWAY from the house and most importantly the foundation/basement/crawlspace. If they are even half full a good hard rain will cause them to overflow. How often do we have really strong pop up thunderstorms around east Tennessee? I am not immune to this myself, I have jumped on a ladder with a leaf blower and blown my gutters out just before a storm was about to hit because I had put it off. People ask me all the time how to keep their basement or crawlspace dry. Keep your gutters clean is the first thing I tell them. Waterproofing and drains do work, but keeping the water off of the foundation to begin with works better and is much MUCH cheaper. If you don’t believe me, price a whole new set of gutters with leaf guards and the whole works, then go and price getting a foundation company to come out and dig up your foundation/crawlspace and add or add more water mitigation.