Handyman in LaFayette, Georgia

Repairs by part of town

LaFayette 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 West Main Street mill village

West Main runs west out of town and crosses the Chattooga River, and the mill houses start on the far bank. Two mills faced each other across that street: the hosiery mill at 365 West Main, later Barwick, part of which burned in 2015, and LaFayette Cotton Mills at 300, demolished in 2007. The village they shared is still there. These were cottages of six to eight rooms on an eighth of an acre, with concrete sidewalks and running water in them from the start, and the thing about a village is that nothing in it was a one off. The same porch framing, the same window sizes and the same door heights run the length of a street, so a rotted sill here is a repair with a template rather than a puzzle. What gets looked at first is the sills, the porch decking at the step, and whatever was added on the back after the mills closed.

Probasco Street, North Chattanooga and Bradley

The other village, at the other end of town and about ten years older. Union Cotton Mill was organized on Probasco Street in 1893 and was the first textile mill in LaFayette. The mill is gone and an industrial building stands on the site, but the block bounded by North Chattanooga Street, Bradley Avenue and Probasco Street is still mill housing. Older stock, a different plan, and that matters more than it sounds, because the two villages are not interchangeable and neither are their parts. The work here is small frame carpentry done in place. Weatherboard let into a wall rather than the wall re-clad, a sash repaired rather than a window unit ordered, a porch post copied off the one standing next to it.

The square and the streets behind it

The courthouse that stood on the public square burned in 1883, and the county put its replacement up a block east on Duke Street in 1918. What is left around the square is two-story commercial brick, most of it a century old or better, and the oldest houses in town are on the streets behind it. Two of those houses are on the National Register on their own account, the Marsh House and Chattooga Academy, both from 1836. What LaFayette does not have is a historic district. Three individual listings, no district, which means nobody reviews what an owner does to the outside of a house here. That cuts both ways. There is no permission to wait for, and there is also nothing stopping a hundred year old porch being replaced with something that will look wrong from the street for the next fifty years. Matching is a choice in LaFayette rather than a requirement, and on these streets it is usually the right one.

The streets built after the war

Most of LaFayette is neither square nor village. The town's biggest decade of building was the 1960s, with the 1950s and the 1970s close behind, and that is a different animal: brick veneer or hardboard over frame, low pitched roof, shallow eaves, a crawlspace you can barely get into or a slab you cannot get under at all, steel or early aluminum windows, hollow core doors inside. Roper has been making ranges on Broomtown Road since 1973, and much of the housing on the roads out of town is of that era. These houses do not need matching, they need parts. Soft subfloor at the back door and around bathrooms, exterior doors that were never flashed properly at the sill, fascia behind a gutter that has been overflowing for years, and the interior doors and hardware all giving out at once because they all went in the same month.

What a Rome base means for LaFayette

What LaFayette 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 LaFayette

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