The trade of a hundred small competencies
Some repairs have no category, only a symptom. Baseboard pulling away where the AC's condensation line once dripped; shoe molding a vacuum cleaner has been eating for years; a stair nose that creaks its announcement of every midnight snack; interior trim gaps that opened when the house dried out its first winter; a threshold splintering under a decade of sandy feet; the closet door off its pivot; the towel bar that has been reinstalled three times into the same tired holes. General repair is the trade of handling all of it in one visit — matched profiles for the trim, coated fasteners because this is the coast, filled and caulked and touch-painted so the repair vanishes instead of announcing itself.
Older housing stock gets a special word: Conway's historic blocks and the county's first-generation beach cottages carry decades of previous repairs, and work there is as much archaeology as carpentry — finding what is original, what is 1985, and what is holding what up. Pre-1978 homes add federal lead-safe practice whenever old painted surfaces get disturbed, raised in the quote rather than discovered in the dust.