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Cobb County, Georgia

Handyman in Kennesaw, Georgia

Kennesaw took its name from the mountain, but its first name was Big Shanty, and that one is about the ground. The railroad had to climb out of the Etowah valley to get here, the camps for the men cutting that grade sat at the top of the pull, and the town stayed where the camps were. It is still the high side of this corner of Cobb: houses set into a slope, on red Piedmont clay, with the water off the mountain side of town running past them toward Noonday Creek. The old core is a few blocks. Nearly everything else went up after the college and the mall arrived, and in November 1992 a tornado came through and damaged or destroyed more than three hundred houses and businesses here, which is why there are streets where the siding and the windows date from one winter instead of from the year the house was built.

Repairs by part of town

Kennesaw 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, Lewis Street and Summers Street
The old town is small enough that you can read its sequence off the buildings. A one-story brick store went up on Main in the 1880s, a three-story went up at Main and Lewis in 1903, and by the 1910s the run between them was continuous brick. The middle of that block came down in the 1950s and is J. O. Stephenson Avenue now, which is why the row has a gap in it. The houses beside and behind are frame: two rooms and a center hall, or four rooms, then front-gabled plans once local builders got past the plain rectangle, then Craftsman bungalows on Lewis and Summers with lower roofs and wide eaves. A good many of those houses are shops today, and a house doing a shop's work wears in a way it was never framed for. The front steps, the porch decking, the entry door, its hinges and the floor inside it take hundreds of times the traffic they were built for, and that is usually the job.
Big Shanty Drive and the Cobb Parkway side
The town's building moved out toward Cobb Parkway in the 1950s, and the ranch houses on Big Shanty Drive are what that looked like. Standing that close to the frame houses on Main, they make the point better than any date does: a block apart, seventy years apart, wanting nothing in common. On the ranch side the recurring items are the ones a long low house on falling ground produces. A lot of roof drains into not much gutter and lands close to the wall. Carports get closed in, which puts a heated room over a slab that was poured to park a car on and leaves a wall junction nobody detailed at the time. Hollow-core doors, closet tracks, sliding door rollers and cabinet hardware from those years all wore out on the same schedule. Nothing on that list is hard. There is simply a lot of it in one house.
The campus side: Chastain Road, Frey Road and the rentals around them
The college was chartered in 1963 and has not stopped growing, and the streets nearest it carry the result. A large share of that housing is rented rather than owned, often several people to a house, and a rented house does not fail the way an owner-occupied one does. Wear beats weather out here. Doors go loose in the jamb and strike plate screws pull out of framing that has already taken more than one set of screws. Drywall takes hits at outside corners and around switch plates. Blinds, closet doors and cabinet catches give up. Deck rails get sat on until they move. And it all comes due in the same two weeks, between one tenant and the next, on a calendar set by the semester rather than by the season.
Up the grade: Stilesboro, Legacy Park and the mountain side
On the mountain side of Kennesaw the ground climbs toward the summit, and Kennesaw Mountain is a monadnock: the rock in it was hard enough to stand while everything around it wore down, and it is still the highest point in the Atlanta metro. Houses on that rising ground were built by cutting a shelf into the clay, which leaves the back of the house well above grade and the ground above it draining toward the back wall. That sets the whole list. Decks come off the second floor on tall posts with long stair runs, and those posts stand in clay that holds water for days after the surface has dried. Landings and rails carry more load than they look like they carry. Water coming down the slope arrives at the back of the house rather than the front, so a downspout doing nothing at a back corner costs more here than the same downspout would on flat ground. Legacy Park and the streets around it filled in from the mid nineties into the two thousands, which puts all of that at the same age at the same time.

What a Rome base means for Kennesaw

What Kennesaw 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 Kennesaw

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Based in Rome, about 33 miles from Kennesaw. Worth knowing up front: a single small job at that distance is worth a conversation first, while a list handled in one visit is straightforward.

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