Handyman in Cedartown, Georgia

Repairs by part of town

Cedartown is not all one kind of house, and the repair work changes with it. See if you can find your own house in this.

Big Spring Park and the Main Street blocks

Big Spring Park sits on Wissahickon Avenue just west of downtown, and the commercial blocks beside it run back toward East Avenue and College Street. This is the low ground. A crawlspace here does not get a dry season the way one on a ridge does, so grading, downspout runs and where water is put after it leaves the roof protect a floor more than anything done to the floor itself. Check the crawlspace before pulling up boards.

Northwest Cedartown: Wissahickon, Cave Spring Road, North College

The older residential streets between Jule Peek Avenue, Spruce, Wissahickon and Marshall, with the biggest houses on Wissahickon, Cave Spring Road and North College. Queen Anne and Folk Victorian next door to Craftsman bungalows and Colonial Revival, which means no two jobs on the same block are the same job. Plaster instead of board in the older ones. Sash windows that have moved with the frame. Porch columns and brackets that have to be matched rather than swapped for something off a shelf.

South Philpot Street

A short district on the east side of Main Street, built out between about 1880 and 1910: Queen Anne, Neoclassical and Colonial Revival, some Craftsman at the late end. Houses of that vintage carry deep porches with columns doing real structural work, tall single-pane sashes painted shut over a century of repaints, and interior walls of plaster on lath. Plaster cracks along its keys and behaves nothing like modern board when you go to patch it, so the repair method is decided by what is behind the paint.

The slopes out of the valley, and the newer streets

Cedar Valley has sides, and houses built up on them get a different list from houses on the valley floor. Water arrives from uphill instead of sitting, so the problem moves outdoors: swales, downspout extensions, retaining and step work under permanent load, decks stepping down a grade on posts of very different lengths. The tall posts are where movement starts. Newer building out toward the edges of town mostly wants the ordinary list instead: doors, drywall, deck boards going soft at the fixings.

What a Rome base means for Cedartown

Cedartown is a straight run down US 27 from Rome, a little under twenty miles. What that buys is practical: a material run that turns out to be needed does not eat the day, and a job that needs a second visit gets one without a two-week wait. The other half is familiarity. Floyd and Polk County housing came up in the same decades under the same trades, and the failures repeat.

What Cedartown 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.

• Crawlspaces on the low ground never get a dry season. Big Spring is the visible end of a limestone aquifer under this part of the valley, and the low ground near it behaves accordingly. A crawlspace that stays damp year round works on joists and subfloor, and the first anyone notices is a floor with a little give near an exterior wall. Subfloor and structural repair and home repair.
• Plaster in the historic districts is not drywall with a different name. South Philpot Street and Northwest Cedartown were built out before board was in use. Plaster holds onto lath through keys pushed through the gaps, and when a crack opens it is usually because those keys have broken behind an area much wider than the crack. Skimming the line closes it for a season. Drywall and plaster repair and interior painting.
• Water arriving from uphill is not a gutter problem alone. On the lots that climb out of the valley, clearing the gutters is a quarter of the job. The rest is where the downspout puts the water once it is off the roof, whether the grade in the first six feet falls away from the house, and whether a retaining wall is holding back a saturated bank. Gutter cleaning and repair and structural repairs.
• Porches on the pre-1910 streets are carrying real weight. The deep porches on South Philpot and the Queen Anne houses northwest of Main carry roof load down through columns that look ornamental. Rot starts at the base, where the column meets the deck and end grain sits in standing water. By the time the trim looks wrong the bearing is already compromised, so the column comes off before the paint goes on. Siding and structural repairs and porch and deck work.
• Doors in old frames stop latching because the frame moved, not the door. Common in the districts and in anything built on the valley floor over a damp crawlspace. The opening racks a fraction of an inch out of square over decades, hinge screws strip out of the softened frame, and planing the door edge treats the symptom, not the cause. The fix is usually at the hinge side and the strike plate. Door repair and the rest of the list.

Every service, across Cedartown

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