Handyman services in Cobb County, Georgia

The rock changes on the way here, and the repair changes with it

Rome works over limestone. That stops at the Cartersville Fault, and east of the fault the rock is Piedmont: hard crystalline gneiss, including the body under Acworth that geologists named after the town, and the same resistant family of rock that left Kennesaw Mountain standing after everything around it wore flat. Weathered down, Piedmont rock makes the deep red clay this corner is built on, and clay like that does not drain, it holds. A post set into it stays wet at the base for days after the top of the ground has dried. A crawlspace over it stays damp with no leak anywhere to point at. And the same clay shrinks through a dry August and swells again once the ground takes water in the spring, which is a large part of why a door that has been closing all summer starts catching on the strike side in March.

1864 took the old houses, so old here starts in the 1880s

Acworth was burned in November 1864 and twelve houses and one church were left standing. Big Shanty, now Kennesaw, went the same way. What that leaves on the ground is a corner of Cobb where a genuinely old house usually means 1880 to 1920, and where the few older survivors, the two-story Plantation Plain houses on North Main in Acworth among them, are one room deep. That is not a style note. One room deep means both long walls are weather walls, every room is an outside room, and the kitchen, the bathroom and the back porch were all cut into a wall that was already facing the weather. Those seams are where the trim stops lining up, where the siding meets nothing square, and where a repair on one side of a wall turns out to need one on the other.

A mill village, a Corps lake and a mall, in that order

The building history here arrived in pushes, and each one left a different kind of house. A cotton mill opened in Acworth in 1905 and put a village of frame cottages beside the tracks to house the people working it. Lake Allatoona opened at the end of 1950 and turned the whole northwest corner toward the water. A college opened at Kennesaw in the sixties, the mall opened at Barrett Parkway in 1986 on ground that had been hills and farmland, and the subdivisions followed both of them out. Three eras, three completely different lists. The cottages want matched trim and careful work around what was done to them in the forties. The lake houses want stairs, rails, decks and drainage on a bank. The subdivision houses want the thirty-year list.

The newest housing here is now the oldest problem

Northwest Cobb filled in quickly, from the late eighties into the two thousands, and a house from that run is now somewhere between twenty-five and forty years old. That is not old for a house. It is exactly the age at which the outside of one comes due all at once: fascia gone soft behind a gutter that has been overflowing quietly for a few seasons, deck boards turned spongy along the joist line, a rail you can rock with one hand though nothing about it looks wrong, door bottoms and thresholds, siding opening at its joints, and drywall cracking back in over the same door heads it always cracks over. Not one of those is a big job on its own. They arrive together, and they are worth handling together.

Towns we cover in Cobb County

Two towns here, six miles apart on the same railroad but not at the same height on it. Acworth sits down at the water. Kennesaw sits at the top of the long pull the line made up from the river, which is where its older name of Big Shanty came from.

Why a Rome base works here

US 411 runs southeast from Rome to Cartersville, and from there it is about twelve miles down to Acworth on the line the old Dixie Highway took, which inside Acworth is still Main Street. Cobb is the far edge of the ground covered from Rome and it is scheduled as the far edge: a day set aside rather than an hour squeezed in, booked ahead rather than dropped in on. That is worth knowing before anyone calls about a single sticking door. This is a county to save a list up for, and a list is what these houses tend to produce anyway.

Every service, across Cobb 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