On Wed, 25 Mar 2020 15:38:55 -0400, Peter
wrote:

On 3/25/2020 2:33 PM, wrote:
On Wed, 25 Mar 2020 09:09:24 -0400, Peter
wrote:

On 3/24/2020 12:44 PM, MissTea67 wrote:
We are looking at a home in Georgia. The home has no gutters & the
seller will
not replace. This is a cause of concern.

Make sure that all contact surfaces between the exterior walls and the
slab are not damaged due to chronic excessive moisture. If there's a
basement, the foundation may not be in good condition unless excellent
grading has existed all around the perimeter of the structure. Also,
termites tend to prefer moist ground so a competent termite inspection
should be done prior to proceeding with the purchase. If in doubt, the
cost of hiring a professional real estate inspector may be a good
investment.

It is pretty common in the south not to have gutters. It really
depends on how long the overhang is and how well the ground drains. If
you get down far enough south we don't have basements to worry about
in the first place.
A rain gutter full of leaves is far worse than any gutter at all, no
matter where you live and in a heavy rain, those screens shuttle most
of the water over the side anyway. People are just not willing to go
out in the rain to look.

And your absence of basements magnifies your risk of injury/death when
tornadoes come unless you're fortunate enough to have a storm cellar. I
lived for two years in "tornado alley" where the ground was hard red
clay. My house was a typical modest rancher on a slab in a modest
income development. None of the houses had storm cellars. I spent many
anxious minutes in an interior bathroom tub with a mattress pulled over
me whenever the sirens sounded. Much more anxiety provoking than the
few times I had to mop up basement seepage from my clogged gutters in my
other places in the northeast and mid-Atlantic.

A basement in Florida is called an inside swimming pool. You can dig a
well here with a post hole digger.
FEMA does have plans for above ground safe rooms that will survive an
F4 but I have never heard of anyone building one. The reality is the
cyclones we get here are usually not much more powerful than the eye
wall of a hurricane. They are usually small, skip and go things. Not
the monster that eats half of Oklahoma.
We do build to the 150 MPH wind code here and it is 160 a couple miles
west of me. A little dust devil doesn't really scare us that badly.