Gordon County, Georgia
Handyman in Plainville, Georgia
Plainville sits in the southwest corner of Gordon County with the Floyd County line for its southern boundary, and the low ridge just north of town is a shale pit with a brick plant beside it. That is what the place is known for, and it is what makes the housing read differently from the rest of the county: more brick per house than a village this size would carry anywhere else, and on a brick house the masonry is the one part that never rots, so everything that does rot is concentrated at the openings and behind the gutters where nobody is looking. State Route 53 runs a mile and a half east and misses the town, so the old streets were never widened and the houses on them still sit close to the road. The main line between Chattanooga and Atlanta does not miss it, and runs heavy freight straight through the middle.
Repairs by part of town
Plainville is not all one kind of house, and the repair work changes with it. See if you can find your own house in this.
- Earl, School, Park and the old village streets
- City hall is on Earl Street and the recreation department is on School Street, which gives you the scale of it: a handful of streets, houses close to the road, and no two lots alike. Nothing here went up in a run the way a mill village does, so these houses aged individually rather than together, and the list on any one of them is its own. Old small house work, mostly. Sash painted over so many times the stops and the cords are gone. An exterior door frame that has moved with the house until the door catches on the strike side. Porch decking soft at the step. A back room added at some point that sits half an inch off the original floor. Small items, several at once, which is how they are best handled.
- Brickyard Road and the shale ridge
- The pit is on the east slope of the low ridge just north of town, west of the plant, and the shale in it is soft and brown where the weather has been at it, hard and gray a few feet down. Weathered shale makes clay, and clay around a foundation holds water instead of passing it along. Gutters and downspout runs earn their keep here more than they would on sandy ground, and grade that falls back toward the house turns into a problem sooner. On the brick houses the rot is all at the openings: window sills, the trim over the door heads, the fascia behind the gutter, the soffit returns. The wall reads sound from the street the whole time it is happening.
- County Line Road and the Floyd side
- Plainville's southern boundary is the Floyd County line, and County Line Road runs along it in both directions. Housing on that seam is county housing rather than town housing: bigger lots, outbuildings, carports, shops, and additions that went up whenever somebody had the money rather than to any plan. Every junction between an original house and something added later is a place where two roof planes meet, and that is where water gets in and where the drywall opens. Out here it pays to look at the whole property in one visit instead of one item, because on a place with a house, a carport and a shop the same neglected detail is usually repeating on all three.
- Out toward the Bend and Moores Ferry
- Three miles west the Oostanaula swings through the wide loop people call the Bend, and the roads out that way still carry the names of what used to be on them, Moores Ferry and River Bend among them. That is bottomland. The water table is high, the ground gives its moisture up slowly, and a crawlspace under a house sitting on it stays humid in seasons when everything above it is dry. Humidity of that kind works on the joist ends, the band board and the underside of the subfloor near the outside walls. It is a symptom you feel rather than see, and it turns up years after the cause. Anything else framed close to the ground out here is sitting in the same damp and worth looking at on the same visit: back steps, a landing, the sill of a shed door.
What a Rome base means for Plainville
What Plainville 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 Plainville
- Handyman & Home Repair in Plainville, the list you keep meaning to get to
- TV Mounting in Plainville, mounted into something that holds
- Drywall Repair in Plainville, patches that disappear
- Interior Painting in Plainville, the prep is the job
- Deck Building & Deck Repair in Plainville, the frame decides the job
- Siding & Structural Repairs in Plainville, repaired where it's sound, replaced where it isn't
- Door Repair & Installation in Plainville, doors that latch first time
- Gutter Cleaning & Repair in Plainville, clear gutters protect the fascia behind them
- Pressure Washing in Plainville, the right pressure for the surface
- LVP Flooring Installation in Plainville, the floor is only as flat as what is under it
- Screened Porches in Plainville, the part of the house you actually use
- Fence Installation & Repair in Plainville, the posts are the fence
Repairs in Plainville?
Send the list. You'll get a straight answer on price and timing.