Handyman in Valley Head, Alabama

Repairs by part of town

Valley Head 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 block by the tracks

Downtown Valley Head is barely more than one block square, on Commerce and Railroad Avenues where the town meets the line, and the commercial buildings read as 1910s to 1930s work. Behind them, on Church Street, School Street and the numbered avenues, the housing is that generation and older: weatherboard siding, wood sash with weights and cords, and front porches carrying their own roof on posts that sit low to the ground. The low posts are the item that repeats. They rot from the bottom up inside the paint, so nothing looks wrong until a rail feels soft and the bottom few inches of the post have already gone. Winston Place on the edge of town shows the local pattern in one building: an 1838 house remodeled in the 1880s or 1890s and then given rooms on the back between 1900 and 1920. Almost nothing here was replaced. It was added to, and the seams between the eras are where water gets in.

The foot of the mountain, out the Mentone road

East of town Alabama 117 begins climbing toward Mentone, and the houses along the bottom of that slope live with whatever the slope sends down. Water gets here before it gets anywhere else: sheet runoff after a hard rain, grit and leaf litter carried in it, and seepage that keeps working long after the sky clears. Retaining walls and steps on this side lean downhill over the years because the ground beneath them is doing the same thing slowly. Crawlspace vents on the uphill wall take splash all winter. The order of work matters more here than the work does. Drainage first, carpentry second, because wood replaced without moving the water away is wood that gets replaced again.

Out on the valley floor toward the caverns

North and west of town the lots open out into farm ground: bigger acreage, older farmhouses, and outbuildings that have been added to instead of replaced. This is the limestone floor of the valley, and limestone holds water high and lets it go slowly, so a barn door that dragged last spring is dragging again this one and the sills under a shed are usually softer than anything under the house. The work out here is nearly all exterior and it arrives as a list rather than a single job. Gates and doors that no longer close square, porch decking and rails at the end of their run, siding that has taken forty years of weather on its west face, and the shop or the shed where nothing is ever urgent enough to call about on its own. Grouped into one visit it is worth doing. One item at a time it is not.

What a Rome base means for Valley Head

What Valley Head 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 Valley Head

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