Handyman in Centre, Alabama

Repairs by part of town

Centre is not all one kind of house, and the repair work changes with it. See if you can find your own house in this.

Main Street and the courthouse blocks

Five blocks of storefronts with the courthouse on the north side and the county museum next door in one of the larger old buildings, and the Savage-Campbell House standing across from the Methodist church. A few houses in town go back to the middle of the eighteen hundreds, the Daniel House and the Jordan House among them, and they are the exception here rather than the pattern. Work in this part of town is work on buildings that have been divided and redivided: interior partitions that do not line up with anything below them, wood windows sitting in masonry openings, transoms painted shut, and door hardware that has to be matched rather than swapped.

The mid-century streets

This is the bulk of Centre and the bulk of the work. Single-story houses on crawlspace and slab, built in runs through the fifties, sixties and seventies, with shallow eaves that put rain straight down onto the siding and the sills instead of clear of them. Because they went up in batches, they wear out in batches. The same window detail, the same hollow-core interior doors and the same trim profiles run street after street and all reach the end of their life within a few years of each other, which is why one neighbor's repair list tends to predict the next one's.

The north side down toward the lake

The city limits run north to the south shore of Weiss Lake, past Garrett Cemetery on the bank of the Coosa, and the ground falls as you go. Lower, wetter, closer to water: crawlspaces that never fully dry between rains, joist ends and subfloor going soft near exterior walls, and decks and screen porches added on to face the water years after the house was built. Most of what feels like a floor problem down here starts as a drainage problem, and putting new wood in without answering the water question buys a few seasons and no more.

The Piedmont road and the bypass edge

Alabama 9 runs south out of town toward Piedmont and the highways swing around the north, and the newer building is strung along both on bigger lots. Centre also holds most of the rental housing in the county, duplexes and small apartment buildings, which is a different rhythm of work again: doors, drywall, trim and paint between tenants, on a clock, where the same handful of repairs comes around again in the same rooms.

What a Rome base means for Centre

What Centre homes tend to need

A few repairs come up far more often than the rest here. None of them are dramatic. All of them get worse and more expensive if left.

Every service, across Centre

• Handyman & Home Repair in Centre, the list you keep meaning to get to
• TV Mounting in Centre, mounted into something that holds
• Drywall Repair in Centre, patches that disappear
• Interior Painting in Centre, the prep is the job
• Deck Building & Deck Repair in Centre, the frame decides the job
• Siding & Structural Repairs in Centre, repaired where it's sound, replaced where it isn't
• Door Repair & Installation in Centre, doors that latch first time
• Gutter Cleaning & Repair in Centre, clear gutters protect the fascia behind them
• Pressure Washing in Centre, the right pressure for the surface
• LVP Flooring Installation in Centre, the floor is only as flat as what is under it
• Screened Porches in Centre, the part of the house you actually use
• Fence Installation & Repair in Centre, the posts are the fence