Faucets, toilets, sinks, shut-off valves, tub and shower work, and the rough-in behind a Gilmanton renovation — the everyday plumbing that makes a house work properly.
Gilmanton covers a lot of ground for a town its size — Gilmanton Corner, Gilmanton Iron Works, and a long web of back roads through farmland and woods with houses set well off the pavement. There is no municipal water system and no town sewer. Effectively every property is on a drilled well with a pressure tank and a private septic system, which makes the homeowner responsible for the entire chain from the aquifer to the drain field.
That has practical consequences. A power outage here isn’t just an inconvenience — no power means no well pump, which means no water at all, and no way to flush. Gilmanton loses power more often and for longer than the village towns do, and homes with a generator or at least a stored-water plan get through winter storms a lot better. It also means water quality is entirely a private matter: no municipality is testing or treating what comes out of your tap.
The housing runs old. There are eighteenth- and nineteenth-century farmhouses out here that have had plumbing added, moved, and re-added across a century and a half, often with the original well line still entering through a fieldstone foundation. Add long dirt driveways, deep frost on exposed hillsides, and outbuildings with their own frost-free hydrants, and you get a specific Gilmanton failure list: frozen well lines at the foundation entry, waterlogged pressure tanks, and hydrants that were never drained.
Access is its own factor. Some of these roads are not maintained in winter, and we’d rather know that when you call than discover it at the end of the driveway.
Know where your pressure tank, pressure switch, and well shut-off are before something fails — and put a label on them. In a town with no municipal backup, five minutes of knowing where things are is the difference between a wet floor and a flooded basement.
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.
Tell us what’s happening and we’ll give you a straight answer — what it likely is, what it should cost, and when we can be there.
Describe what’s happening and where the property is. We’ll come back with a straight answer on what it likely is, what it should cost, and when we can be there. If it’s an emergency, say so in the first line.
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