Northwest Georgia
Handyman services in Walker County, Georgia
Walker County drains the other way. The Tennessee Valley divide crosses it, so most of the rain that falls here leaves north toward Chattanooga rather than south down the Coosa, and the towns face that way as well. The shape of the place is ridges and the flats between them. Lookout Mountain closes the western side, Pigeon Mountain stands off LaFayette with McLemore Cove folded in behind it, and Taylor Ridge holds the eastern line. Sandstone caps the ridges. Limestone lies under the valleys, and the valleys are where the houses are.
The valley floor is full of holes
Walker County has close to a hundred and fifty known caves, and Ellison's Cave on Pigeon Mountain drops better than a thousand feet. That is a curiosity until you own a house on the valley floor, because the same rock is under it. Limestone and dolomite take water down through cracks and solution channels instead of shedding it across the surface, so a downspout emptying at the corner of a foundation here leaves no puddle to warn anybody. The water just goes. The first sign of it is usually a crawlspace that smells damp in August, or a floor gone soft inside a back door. Getting roof water carried well clear of the house solves most of it, and waiting for standing water to tell you there is a problem does not work on this ground.
No single decade built this county
Most towns have an era. Walker County does not. There is about as much housing standing here from the 1950s as from the 1990s, about as much from before the war as from after 2000, and the longest stretch of building was the 1970s rather than any boom since. On the ground that means one rural road carrying a pre-war farmhouse, a brick ranch, a split level and a house finished last year, none of them sharing a door size, a window, a siding profile or a floor height. Nothing repeats out here the way it repeats in a subdivision, so it is worth walking a job before anyone puts a number on it. The awkward part is never the part you would pick from the street.
Four employers, four patterns of house
Rossville grew around Peerless Woolen Mills from 1905. Chickamauga grew around the Crystal Springs bleachery, built in 1909 and running until 2013, and the housing it put up for its workers is still lived in. Fort Oglethorpe, part of which sits in the county, started as an Army cavalry post completed in 1904, and the officers' quarters around Barnhardt Circle are somebody's home now. LaFayette had two mill villages of its own, at opposite ends of town and about a decade apart. Four employers, four patterns, one county, and every one of them means the same useful thing on site. The house was built alongside a row of others to one drawing, so what failed at your place has usually already failed at a neighbor's, and the repair that held there is the one to copy.
Up on the mountain the rules change
Not all of Walker County is on the valley floor. Houses stand on the brow of Lookout Mountain and back in McLemore Cove between Lookout and Pigeon, and the cove is a National Register district in its own right, which the county seat is not. Weather reaches a house on the brow with nothing in front of it. A deck up there steps down the slope on posts of four different lengths, and the long one at the low end is carrying the most load while standing in the wettest ground. Gutters take grit and small limbs off the slope above rather than just leaves off the roof. And the drive up is long enough that everything for the job wants to arrive with the person doing it, which is an argument for one longer visit instead of three short ones.
Towns we cover in Walker County
LaFayette is the main Walker County town for this work, at the southern end of the county where US 27 comes up from Rome. The rest of the county is worked the same way: Chickamauga and Rock Spring north of it, Rossville and Fort Oglethorpe at the state line, Kensington and the cove over toward Pigeon Mountain.
LaFayette, GA
Two mill villages at opposite ends of town, a courthouse square between them, and a valley floor that takes rainwater straight down.
What LaFayette homes needWhy a Rome base works here
US 27 runs north out of Rome as the Martha Berry Highway and does not stop at the Chattooga County line. Past Summerville it climbs on into Walker County, and LaFayette sits on it. One road, start to finish, which is what makes a county this far north an ordinary drive rather than an expedition. Batching matters more here than it does in town, so we would rather have the whole list than one item at a time. The drive is the part that does not get shorter. Everything else does.
Every service, across Walker County
- Handyman & Home Repair, the list you keep meaning to get to
- TV Mounting, mounted into something that holds
- Drywall Repair, patches that disappear
- Interior Painting, the prep is the job
- Deck Building & Deck Repair, the frame decides the job
- Siding & Structural Repairs, repaired where it's sound, replaced where it isn't
- Door Repair & Installation, doors that latch first time
- Gutter Cleaning & Repair, clear gutters protect the fascia behind them
- Pressure Washing, the right pressure for the surface
- LVP Flooring Installation, the floor is only as flat as what is under it
- Screened Porches, the part of the house you actually use
- Fence Installation & Repair, the posts are the fence
Something needs doing in Walker County?
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