Faucets, toilets, sinks, shut-off valves, tub and shower work, and the rough-in behind a Franklin renovation — the everyday plumbing that makes a house work properly.
Franklin sits where the Pemigewasset and Winnipesaukee rivers meet to form the Merrimack, and it was built on that water power. The result is a housing stock that skews older than anywhere else in the Lakes Region — dense neighborhoods of nineteenth-century multi-family houses and worker cottages that have been repaired, subdivided, and re-plumbed repeatedly over 130 years.
That history is the plumbing here. Galvanized steel supply lines that have narrowed to a pencil’s width inside, cast-iron drain stacks that have rotted through at the basement floor, lead-jointed connections at the old fittings, and layers of partial upgrades where one owner replaced the kitchen line and left the rest. Most Franklin plumbing problems are age problems, and the honest advice is usually about sequencing: which section to replace this year, which can wait, and which one is going to fail on you in the middle of a cold snap.
The city has municipal water and is connected to the state-run regional sewer system, so most of the developed area is off wells. That simplifies diagnosis but doesn’t simplify the work — getting new pipe through a hundred-year-old balloon-framed wall is its own skill.
Out on Webster Lake the mood changes completely: a ring of camps and cottages, some converted to year-round, most not, all needing the same seasonal shutdown and startup as the rest of the region. Franklin also has a growing base of rental property, and landlords here want the same three things everywhere: fast, honest, and priced so it makes sense on a working building.
In an older Franklin house, a rusty-brown first draw in the morning that clears after ten seconds usually means galvanized supply pipe, not a water quality problem from the city. It’s the inside of your own pipe you’re seeing.
Fixture work looks simple and often isn’t, particularly in older Lakes Region houses. A faucet swap turns into a real job the moment the shut-off valve under the sink won’t close — and in a house with original multi-turn stops, it usually won’t. We replace those valves as a matter of course rather than working around them, because a working shut-off at every fixture is the cheapest insurance in a house.
On remodels we do the rough-in: moving supply and waste to where the new layout wants them, setting vents properly, and getting it inspected before the walls close. Moving a toilet or a shower drain is a framing and venting problem as much as a pipe problem, and getting it wrong is expensive to discover after the tile is in. We’d rather be involved early, when a five-minute conversation can save a week.
We also do the unglamorous list that keeps a house dry: replacing failed hose bibs with frost-free ones, adding shut-offs where there aren’t any, and swapping supply lines that are past their life.
Straightforward fixture work — a faucet, a toilet, a set of shut-off valves — typically runs $200–$600 installed. Bathroom and kitchen remodel rough-in is quoted per project after seeing the plan; getting us in at the drawing stage usually saves more than it costs.
It is usually a $15 part and ten minutes, and most homeowners can do it. Call us if it keeps coming back, if the shut-off under it will not close, or if you are on a well — a running toilet cycles the pump continuously and will shorten the life of a pump that costs well over a thousand dollars to replace.
Yes. Moving a fixture means relocating both supply and drain, and the drain is the constraint — waste lines need proper fall and proper venting, which depends on what the floor framing allows. Bring us in while the layout is still on paper and we can tell you which moves are simple and which ones are expensive.
If they are old multi-turn stops and you have never touched them, yes. They seize in place, and you find out at the worst moment — with water spraying and no way to stop it short of shutting down the whole house. Quarter-turn ball valves are inexpensive and they work when you need them.
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