Handyman services in Cherokee County, Georgia

A county built in one long push

The first stretch of I-575 opened in 1979 and the county filled in behind it, south to north, Woodstock and Holly Springs before Canton and Ball Ground. Houses built in a push like that are built in batches, which has one real advantage: on a given street the same deck detail, the same siding, the same trim and the same hardware run house to house, so what has failed at one address predicts the rest of the street fairly well. Those late 1990s and early 2000s subdivisions are now at the age where the outside gives out before anything else. Deck boards and rails go before the framing under them. Hardboard and composite siding drinks at the cut ends and the butt joints rather than through the face. Rake boards and the trim around garage openings go soft where two pieces meet and nobody ever caulked the joint. None of that is a rebuild. It is carpentry, and the difference between catching it at twenty-five years and at thirty-five is how much has to come off before it can go back.

The northwest corner is a different county

Northwest of Canton the ground rises into the foothills. Bear Mountain is the county high point, Lake Arrowhead sits in the valley just east of it, and Waleska stands eleven hundred feet up where two state routes cross. This end of the county has schist and gneiss under a thinner skin of red clay than the south end, and houses are sited by cut and fill because there is no flat to build on. That gives you a back door four or five feet above the yard, decks and stairs where the south of the county would have a patio, posts in the ground where it would have a slab at grade, and long runs of handrail. It also means every storm that runs off the slope above the house arrives at the house.

Canton built its houses the old way first

Before any of the growth, Canton was a mill town on the Etowah. R. T. Jones and a group of local investors started Canton Cotton Mills in 1899, put up a second mill a mile upriver in 1923, and built housing for the people who ran both. The mills closed in 1981 and the villages did not. What stands there is small frame housing a century old sitting a few miles from houses built in the last twenty years, and the two want opposite things. One wants matching: a weatherboard let in, a sash repaired, a porch post copied off the one still standing. The other wants parts changed out before the water gets past them.

Houses nobody is standing in on a Tuesday

Cherokee County holds a lot of water. Allatoona takes the southwestern corner and Lake Arrowhead sits in the northwest, and around both are houses nobody is in every week of the year. Places like that fail quietly. A gutter that has been overflowing since March is not overflowing where anyone can see it. A deck board splits and nobody stands on it. A door swells shut and stays shut. By the time an owner walks the place the list is not one item, it is nine, and nine small things in one visit is the normal shape of a working day rather than an imposition.

Towns we cover in Cherokee County

Waleska is the Cherokee County town for this work, up in the northwest corner where State Route 140 comes in from Adairsville. Lake Arrowhead is two miles west of it, outside the city limits and on the same drive.

Why a Rome base works here

State Route 140 begins at US 27 just north of Rome, at Armuchee, crosses the Oostanaula and runs east through Adairsville and on into Cherokee County, straight into the crossroads in the middle of Waleska. One road, no interstate, none of Atlanta's traffic. That is why the northwest corner of this county is a reasonable drive from Rome when the southern end of the same county is a different proposition entirely. At this range a run back for a length of trim is not a ten minute errand, so we would rather walk the whole property once and take the list off it in one go.

Every service, across Cherokee County

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