Faucets, toilets, sinks, shut-off valves, tub and shower work, and the rough-in behind a Laconia renovation — the everyday plumbing that makes a house work properly.
Laconia is the one town in the region where you can’t assume anything about a house from the outside. Downtown and along the Union Avenue corridor, homes are on Laconia Water Works and tied into the state-run Winnipesaukee River Basin sewer — which means municipal pressure, a curb stop out front, and a water bill. Ten minutes away, up toward Gilford’s line or out past Parade Road, you’re back on a drilled well and a pressure tank in the basement. The plumbing problems are completely different and so are the fixes.
What ties the city together is age. A lot of Laconia’s housing went up between the 1890s and the 1920s for the hosiery and textile mills, and a good share of it still has original galvanized steel supply lines behind the plaster and cast-iron drain stacks in the walls. Galvanized closes up from the inside — that’s the house where the shower drops to a trickle when someone flushes. Cast iron rots from the bottom of the stack, usually right where it disappears into the basement floor. Both are repairable a section at a time, and both are worth knowing about before you buy or renovate.
Then there’s the seasonal layer. The cottages and camps at Weirs Beach, along Paugus Bay, and around Lake Opechee were built to be lived in from May to October, and many still are. Uninsulated crawlspaces, supply lines run under floors, and a water heater that spends the winter full of water in an unheated building — that’s a burst-pipe bill waiting for the first hard cold snap in December.
We also do a lot of multi-family work here. Laconia has more two- and three-unit rentals than the rest of the region combined, and landlords need the same thing every time: get it fixed today, tell me straight what it cost, and don’t make me chase you.
If your Laconia house was built before about 1960 and the water pressure has been “always kind of low,” that’s usually not the city main — it’s galvanized supply pipe closing up from the inside. Cut one out and look at the opening. Most people are shocked how little is left.
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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