Handyman in Aragon, Georgia

Repairs by part of town

Aragon 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 numbered streets, First through Sixth

The mill village grid, paired east and west of the center, with Elm, Oak, Pine and Walnut crossing it and Brumbelow, Gurley and Williams carrying names the village kept. These went up as company housing in one push: frame, modest, set up off the ground, built off a short list of plans. That still shows. The same sash, the same porch post and the same eave detail run for a block at a time, so a failure on one house is a preview of the two either side of it. What has changed is everything done since. Fifty years of private owners means one house was re-sided in the seventies and its twin in the nineties, and the wall you open is rarely the wall you expected.

The spring end, Spring Street and Waddell Circle

The whole town is here because of the water, and two street names still say so. Ground that produced a spring worth building a mill next to does not shed rain quickly, and the houses nearest it show that under the floor rather than on the walls. A crawlspace that never gets properly dry holds joist ends and subfloor at a moisture content where rot never quite stalls. It is slow, and it is a water problem before it is a wood problem: a downspout emptying straight onto the piers, ground beside the foundation that has settled until it tips the wrong way, a vent painted shut years ago. Sorting that out comes first, or the new wood goes the way of the old.

The mill site and the smokestack

The plant is gone. It stopped in 1970, went through a run of later owners and uses, and the buildings burned in August 2002, leaving the brick smokestack with the town's name down it standing over open ground in the middle of everything. The part that matters to a homeowner is that the village lost its reference. There is no company shop left to match a sash profile against and nobody holding the plans these houses were built from. Anything replaced on a village house now gets copied off the house itself, which is why we template the old piece before it comes out rather than after.

Aragon Road and the roads out of town

Taylorsville Road, Hixville Road, Long Station Road and Flint Hill Road run out of the grid into bigger lots, and the housing changes with them. Instead of one build era there are four, often on the same road: a farmhouse, a fifties brick ranch, a seventies split, and something set down in the last twenty years. Nothing matches anything, so nothing can be ordered by the run. The work out here is the ordinary list rather than the village list. Carports and decks added long after the house, storm doors that never fit their openings, siding patched in a profile that was never made to sit next to what is around it, and heavier tree cover over the gutters than anything in town.

What a Rome base means for Aragon

What Aragon 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 Aragon

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