Handyman in Acworth, Georgia

Repairs by part of town

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

North Main Street and the downtown blocks

The National Register district is a line along Main Street and the railroad, and most of the buildings in it went up between 1880 and 1920 on lots about twenty-five feet wide and a hundred feet deep, built out to the lot lines with sidewalk in front. Narrow face, long sides, flat roof. Because they were built out to the line, the only elevations anyone can reach from their own property are the front and the back, and that is where the display windows, the transoms, the cornice work and the rear doors all sit. North along Main the district turns residential, and an 1880s house with turned spindle work stands next to a Plantation Plain house from before the fire, two stories high and one room deep, with a shed room added on behind. Trim on that street gets matched off a sound length taken from the same house. None of it came from a catalog.

The mill village on Toccoa, Clarkdale, Albany and Thomasville

Half a mile south of downtown on a triangle of streets between South Main and the tracks, with the mill at the top of it and a park and the old Eli Whitney schoolhouse in the middle. Forty-nine of the worker cottages are still standing, most of them pyramidal cottages: square plan, four rooms of roughly equal size, hipped or shed entry porch, one story, frame, sitting on brick piers. About half were built as duplexes and you can still read that off the front, because the second door was taken out and the one that is left sits off center. The larger fact is 1947, when new owners renovated the whole village at once. Concrete block went in between the brick piers, asbestos siding went on over the walls, asphalt shingles went on over the tin, every unit got a bathroom, and the porches were enlarged and given brick steps. Most of the work here is work on that 1947 layer rather than on the 1905 house. The block between the piers is not carrying anything, the added bathrooms are where the soft floors are, and the siding is the one thing on these houses that nobody should put a sander to. That gets identified before anything else starts.

The lake edge, Beach Street and Cauble Park

Acworth has its own lake because of the big one. When the Etowah was dammed and Allatoona filled, people here expected the ground beside town to turn into swamp and petitioned for a second dam to hold a lake at a steady level instead, which is Lake Acworth. Two shorelines, behaving differently. Allatoona is a Corps of Engineers lake and its shoreline is federal ground under a management plan, so a house on Allatoona is generally not on the water. It is up the bank, with a long run of steps down through the clay. Those stairs are the recurring carpentry on that side: stringers, landings, rails, and post bases standing in ground near the bottom that stays wet after the top has dried. Around Lake Acworth and Cauble Park the ground is flatter and the houses sit closer in, which moves the problem off the stairs and onto crawlspaces, gutters and the bottom course of siding.

The west side: Brookstone, Baker Plantation and the Highway 92 corridor

Most of Acworth by count is none of the above. It is subdivision building that started in the late eighties and ran on into the two thousands, spread west and south of the old town along Highway 92 and Cedarcrest, on lots cut into rolling ground. The material worth knowing about out there is hardboard siding, which fails from the bottom edge and the butt joints in: it swells first, loses its paint next, then goes soft, and when one elevation has started the other three are usually a season or two behind rather than fine. It is also worth saying that plenty of addresses reading Acworth are not inside the city and some are not in Cobb at all, because the mailing area runs on into Bartow, Cherokee and Paulding. That is worth settling before anyone quotes, because it changes which city and which county a house answers to.

What a Rome base means for Acworth

What Acworth 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 Acworth

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