Faucets, toilets, sinks, shut-off valves, tub and shower work, and the rough-in behind a Holderness renovation — the everyday plumbing that makes a house work properly.
Holderness is Squam Lake country — the quieter, more private big lake, with a shoreline of family compounds and second homes reached by long wooded drives off Route 113 and Shepard Hill Road, plus genuine island and boat-access properties out on the water. Little Squam and the Squam River channel through the village add another cluster of waterfront buildings.
These are, on the whole, substantial buildings on private drilled wells, and many of them are seasonal or lightly used in winter. That combination — big house, complex plumbing, empty for months, own water system — is the highest-stakes winterization profile in the region. There’s often a well pump, a pressure tank, a filtration setup, three or four bathrooms, a laundry, a kitchen with an ice maker and a pot filler, an outdoor shower, a boathouse, and irrigation. Every one of those has to be handled deliberately.
Access shapes the work here as much as the plumbing does. Squam’s shoreline is deliberately undeveloped-looking, driveways are long and narrow, and some properties are only reachable by water. Getting a new water heater or pressure tank into a house like that is a logistics problem before it’s a plumbing problem, and we’d rather plan it properly with you than show up and improvise.
The village end of Holderness has a small year-round core — the school, the church, houses along the river — with the everyday plumbing work any town has.
On a large Squam-area house, get the winterization documented — a written list of what was drained, what was left charged, and where the antifreeze went. When a different person opens the house in May, that document is what prevents a very expensive mistake.
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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