Fascia and Soffit Repair, Done So It Does Not Rot Again

How to tell yours is going

You can check most of this from the ground with a pair of binoculars, and you should, because fascia is cheap to fix early and expensive to leave.

• Paint blistering or peeling in patches along the bottom edge of the roof. Water is behind the paint, not on it.
• The gutter line has a sag or a dip in it. The gutter is fine, the board it is screwed to has softened.
• Dark staining down the fascia under a valley or a downpipe joint.
• Soffit panels bowing downwards, or a gap opened up where the soffit meets the wall.
• Birds or wasps going in and out under the edge of the roof. If they can get in, so can rain.
• You can push a screwdriver into the board and it goes in. That board is done, and so is anything behind it.

Why fascia rots faster here

The Fraser Valley gets over 1,500 mm of rain a year and the fascia is the one part of a roof that gets hit from two directions. Rain runs down the shingle edge onto it, and wind drives more at it sideways. Then river fog sits in the low ground and keeps it damp for days at a time, so it never gets the chance to dry out between soakings.

On top of that, most fascia in this valley was installed with the back of the board bare. The painter primed and painted the face, because that is the side anyone sees, and the back went up raw against the rafter tails. Water gets behind it, the bare wood drinks it, and the board rots from the inside out while the paint on the front still looks fine. That is why so much fascia here fails at eight or ten years instead of thirty.

How we do it

This is the part worth reading, because it is the difference between a repair that lasts and one you pay for twice.

Every board is back primed, all six sides

Before anything goes near the house, the boards come off the truck and onto sawhorses. We prime all six sides of every board: the face, the back, the top edge, the bottom edge, and both cut ends. Then it goes up. Then it gets two finish coats.

And every time we cut a board on site, the fresh cut end gets primed before it is fastened. A cut end is raw end grain, and end grain wicks water up into the board faster than any other surface on it. Leaving one unprimed undoes the rest of the work.

It costs us time. It is also the single reason our fascia outlasts fascia that went up the normal way, and it is why we will not quote it the normal way.

The rest of it

• We take the gutter down properly rather than working around it, so we can see the whole board and the rafter tails behind it.
• If a rafter tail is soft, it gets cut back to solid wood and sistered. Screwing new fascia to a rotten tail just hides the problem.
• New drip edge and, where the detail needs it, new flashing behind the gutter, so water leaves the roof onto metal rather than onto wood.
• Soffit goes back with the ventilation kept open. On a lot of the repairs we are called to, someone has closed the soffit vents up with the new panel, which chokes the attic.
• Fasteners suited to the material, not whatever was in the van. Galvanised nails into cedar will bleed rust stains down your new board within a year.

The soffit and attic connection

Soffit is not trim. It is half your attic ventilation. Air is meant to come in at the soffit, travel up under the roof deck and leave at the ridge. If the soffit is blocked, painted over, or stuffed with insulation from a loft top-up, that airflow stops.

What happens next is the thing homeowners call us about in February: moist air sits under the roof deck, condenses on the cold sheathing overnight, and drips. People are certain they have a roof leak. There is no leak. The roof is dry and the attic is wet, and the fix is at the soffit, not the shingles. If we are already up there replacing fascia, opening that airflow back up costs almost nothing.

Repair or replace the whole run

Straight answer: if one section has gone and the rest of the run is sound, we replace that section. We are not going to talk you into a full perimeter because it is a bigger invoice.

Where we will push for the whole run is when the boards are the original bare-backed ones and two or three spots have already failed. Patching that means coming back every couple of years for the next one, paying for the gutter to come down each time. Doing the run once, back primed properly, ends it.

What it costs

Fascia and soffit is quoted by the linear foot, and the spread is wide, because a single storey bungalow with a clear driveway is a different job from a three storey with the work over a deck. What moves the number is access, height, how much rafter tail repair we find once the gutter is off, and whether the gutter can go back up or needs replacing.

The inspection is free, every time, and you get one clear price by email with what is included and what is not. Nothing gets added after the fact. If we find rot behind the board that we could not see from the ground, we tell you before we carry on, not after.

Gutters

We do not install gutters. We take yours down and put it back, and if it needs replacing we work alongside Gutters Canada, who quote that part separately. Two invoices, no markup from us on their work, and nobody blaming the other trade when something leaks.

Homes built before 1990

If your house went up before 1990, there may be asbestos in the soffit panels or the material behind them. We check the build year before we quote anything that disturbs existing material, and if testing is needed we say so up front. It is not a reason to panic and it is not a reason to skip it.