Gordon County, Georgia
Handyman in Fairmount, Georgia
Fairmount was a village on the Old Tennessee Road, a cattle and stagecoach route down the east side of the county, until the Louisville and Nashville put track through it in 1905. Philip Tate gave the railroad thirty acres for right of way, set aside fifty more on the east side of the track with a park in the middle, and started a new Fairmount over there. That leaves two housing stocks a few hundred yards apart with almost nothing in common. The old road side went up one house at a time across decades, and no two are alike. The Tate Park grid filled in once the depot opened, which means whole streets of it are the same age and come due together. Which side of the track a house stands on is most of what it is going to need.
Repairs by part of town
Fairmount 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 Tate Park grid: North Park, South Park, Peachtree and Spring
- Fifty acres laid out at once around a park, and filled in after the depot opened. Housing built in a stretch like that shares its details, and that works in an owner's favor: porch framing, window sizes, trim profiles and door hardware repeat house to house, so a rail or a bracket that has rotted away can be measured off the house next door and cut to match. It also means they reach the end of their run together. What goes first on this side is the porch, because a porch of that era is holding up its own roof and the column bases sit on decking that stays wet. Then the sash. Then the sills, at the outside corner where the water sits longest.
- Tennessee Street and the old road
- The pre-railroad side of town, on the route that carried cattle and stages before there was a depot to move to. Houses here were built one at a time and added to ever since, so nothing repeats and nothing matches. Work on this side is matching work. Weatherboard in a profile nobody runs, casings and molding cut on site, an enclosed porch from one decade joined to a back room from another and both joined to the original frame by whoever was available. Those junctions are where the wall opens, where the floor changes level, and where water gets behind the siding. Taking original material out and putting a catalog part in its place usually costs more and looks wrong for the rest of the life of the house.
- Salacoa Avenue, where 411 and 53 cross
- US 411 runs through the middle of town as Salacoa Avenue, and State Route 53 crosses it there. That corner has been the working center of Fairmount for a century. The Ford dealership stood on it, and the building it occupied became the Lacey chenille plant in 1938, the first manufacturing plant on the east side of the county. Buildings fronting a US highway do not weather evenly: the street elevation takes grit, spray and sun the back never sees, so the front porch, the front sash and the front door take twice the punishment and get painted twice as often instead of repaired. Where something on this stretch has gone from house to storefront and back, there is usually more behind the wall board than the surface suggests.
- Salacoa Creek and the bottom fields
- Salacoa Creek runs northwest out of town toward the Coosawattee. The name is Cherokee, sala for greasy and coa for corn, which tells you what the ground was doing before anyone built on it. Virginians settled these fields around 1849 and grew tobacco on them, and they are still the best land in this end of the county. Good bottom land and a dry crawlspace are two different things. A house down on it sits over ground that stays damp well past the weather, and the sequence never changes: the gutters and the fall of the dirt get sorted first, then the joist ends and the subfloor near the exterior walls get cut out and replaced. Reversed, the new subfloor is just the next thing the damp gets to work on.
What a Rome base means for Fairmount
What Fairmount 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 Fairmount
- Handyman & Home Repair in Fairmount, the list you keep meaning to get to
- TV Mounting in Fairmount, mounted into something that holds
- Drywall Repair in Fairmount, patches that disappear
- Interior Painting in Fairmount, the prep is the job
- Deck Building & Deck Repair in Fairmount, the frame decides the job
- Siding & Structural Repairs in Fairmount, repaired where it's sound, replaced where it isn't
- Door Repair & Installation in Fairmount, doors that latch first time
- Gutter Cleaning & Repair in Fairmount, clear gutters protect the fascia behind them
- Pressure Washing in Fairmount, the right pressure for the surface
- LVP Flooring Installation in Fairmount, the floor is only as flat as what is under it
- Screened Porches in Fairmount, the part of the house you actually use
- Fence Installation & Repair in Fairmount, the posts are the fence
Repairs in Fairmount?
Send the list. You'll get a straight answer on price and timing.