Handyman services in DeKalb County, Alabama

Sandstone on top, limestone underneath

The mountains are capped with sandstone and the valley between them was cut into limestone, which is why there are caves at both ends of this county. Manitou Cave opens in the side of Lookout Mountain at Fort Payne, and the caverns under the valley floor at Valley Head have lakes in them. That layering is not a curiosity, it is the reason two houses twenty minutes apart need opposite things. Up on the rock the soil is thin, piers and posts often sit close to stone, and rain does not soak away, it runs, and it runs fast. Down on the valley floor the ground holds water high and gives it up slowly, so a crawlspace stays damp for weeks after the sky clears and the joist ends and the perimeter framing over it take that every year.

The slope is the part that moves

Between the top and the bottom is the slope, and the slope does not sit still. In April 2021 the state closed Alabama 117 between Mentone and Valley Head because the hillside below the road had let go after heavy rain, and the fix meant digging the loose material out of a three-hundred-foot stretch and replacing it with a rock buttress before the road could be rebuilt. A road is not a house, but it is the same hillside. Anything built on that slope or at the bottom of it is dealing with water arriving from above and with ground that travels when it gets heavy. Retaining walls lean. Steps pull away from the landing they were built against. A deck post that was plumb five years ago is not plumb now.

Four years of money, then very little

The Fort Payne Coal and Iron Company was founded in 1889 on New England money, and for roughly four years this was a boom town: an opera house, a hotel of a hundred and twenty-five rooms, and a depot put up in 1891 out of sandstone quarried close by. Then the ore proved not worth mining and the money went home. That short window is why the county's most ambitious old buildings are all about the same age and why the years either side of them are so thin. Work on anything from that period is matching work. The trim profiles, the sash and the porch details were cut by people who were paid properly to cut them, and the nearest thing off a shelf never sits right beside them.

Socks paid for the next fifty years of building

The knitting started in 1907, in a building the boom had already left behind, and hosiery is what carried the county through the twentieth century. It was never one plant with a village around it. The mills were small and there were a great many of them, spread up and down the valley and often run by one family, so the housing that came with them is spread out too: foursquares and bungalows through the 1910s, 1920s and 1930s on the streets behind the main road, then ranch building after the war wherever there was room. A great many of those mills closed between 2000 and 2010. The houses they paid for are all still standing, and most of them are now at the age where the outside work starts.

Towns we cover in DeKalb County

DeKalb County work sits at three different heights on the same mountain. Mentone is on top of Lookout Mountain, Valley Head is at the bottom of that same slope, and Fort Payne is down the valley from both of them.

Why a Rome base works here

This county is reached from the Georgia side by going over Lookout Mountain rather than around it. Georgia 48 runs west out of Summerville through Menlo and Cloudland, crosses the state line, and continues as Alabama 117, which comes into Mentone and then drops off the mountain into Valley Head. Fort Payne sits further down the valley from there. It is a longer run than most of the area covered, and that is exactly why the work here gets grouped. Six small items in one visit is worth the drive. One item on its own usually is not, and it is better to say so at the start than halfway through the morning.

Every service, across DeKalb 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