Handyman in Waleska, Georgia

Repairs by part of town

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

The crossroads at 140 and 108

State Route 140 and State Route 108, which is Fincher Road here, cross in the middle of town with Reinhardt's campus on the corner, and that crossroads is very nearly all of Waleska. The city limits cover about a square mile and a half and hold not many more than a hundred houses. The stock is older than the county's: pre-war frame and 1950s houses on the highway frontage and the short streets behind it, sitting eleven hundred feet up on foothill ground rather than the flat clay at the south end of the county. Seven decades of piecemeal work have been done to a house like that. The wall you open is rarely all one age, the windows are often two or three generations mixed on the same elevation, and the porch has been rebuilt at least once by somebody with whatever was available. Nothing here is a stock size, so everything gets measured rather than assumed.

Lake Arrowhead, west of the crossroads

Two miles west, outside the city limits but with Waleska addresses, Lake Arrowhead is a gated community around a private lake of about five hundred and forty acres, in the valley people here called Lost Town long before there was a lake in it. The land was bought in the 1960s and built out from the early 1970s as a mountain retreat, and it looks like exactly that: cabins and chalets pushed into a slope, front doors reached by a flight of stairs, decks stepping downhill on posts of four different lengths. There is newer building too, cabins and condominiums that came with the Highlands course in 2008 and after. Old or new, the failures belong to the slope. The long post at the low end carries the most and stands in the wettest ground. The ledger where the deck meets the house is where water gets in behind the siding. And the stair stringers take more traffic and more weather than anything else on the lot.

Up toward Bear Mountain

North and west of the lake the ground keeps climbing to Bear Mountain, the high point of Cherokee County at a bit over two thousand three hundred feet. Houses out here are one offs on acreage, sited wherever the slope allowed, which means cut and fill: the uphill side of the crawlspace is buried and the downhill side stands in open air, and the front and the back of the same house sit at two different heights above the ground. Everything a storm does on the hill above ends up here. Gravel drives shed toward the house as often as away from it, a downspout on the uphill wall has nowhere to send water, and the uphill side of the crawlspace is where it shows first. Getting the water past the house is most of the job out here. The carpentry is what is left afterward.

What a Rome base means for Waleska

What Waleska 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 Waleska

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