About Embers & Eaves
Embers & Eaves exists to help homeowners close the two gaps that quietly do the most damage to a house: water, and fire. They meet at the same place, the roofline, and almost nobody is looking there until something goes wrong.
Who writes this
Steve Crews has spent the last two-plus years as a gutter and water-management consultant, doing in-home exterior assessments for homeowners and writing up what he finds. Day to day, that means walking a property and diagnosing how water and debris move around it: how the gutters are flowing, whether the roofline is shedding water and debris into the gutter (and then away from the foundation) the way it should, and where it isn’t. He looks at the details most people overlook: gutter alignment and pitch, the number of downspouts, and how shingle grit and tree debris quietly degrade a system over time.
One thing he repeats to homeowners: a clean gutter is only half the story. What really protects a house is making sure water actually lands in the gutter and is carried away, not slipping in behind it, between the eavestrough and the fascia, where it rots fascia boards and can work its way into the home and cause mould and structural damage. Getting water where it belongs, and keeping it there, is most of the job.
That same roofline is also a wildfire weak point. For homes surrounded by trees, the debris that collects in and on gutters is fuel, and wind-blown embers landing in dry leaf litter are how most homes actually ignite in a wildfire. Keeping that debris out removes fuel from exactly the spot embers tend to find. It’s the overlap of these two risks, water and fire, that this site is about.
The background behind the advice
Before this work, Steve owned his own business and ran sales and marketing for a modular home builder, where he learned how a home is protected from the outside in, how the exterior holds up against the elements. Earlier still, he was a mortgage broker working with clients financing self-builds and new construction, which gave him a working understanding of how homes get built: the stages, the sequence, and what has to happen, in what order, to end up with a sound house.
He writes Embers & Eaves to help homeowners make practical, well-informed decisions about protecting the home they’ve got, from water, from embers, and from the expensive surprises that show up when the roofline isn’t doing its job.