Charlotte County
Plumber in St. Andrews, New Brunswick
Old houses and a calendar. Those are the two things that shape plumbing work in St. Andrews, and both of them change how a job ought to be done. Kenny & Sons is family-run, licensed and insured, and works on both.
Where We Work
Two things change
the plumbing here
St. Andrews and the properties around it
The first is age. St. Andrews is a seaside town with a lot of buildings that have been standing a very long time, and a house that old has never been plumbed once. It has been plumbed four or five times over, in pieces, by different hands, as things wore out. What sits behind the wall is a record of every one of those repairs — and you want to understand what you are looking at before you put a saw through it.
The second is the calendar. A fair number of properties around St. Andrews fill up for part of the year and sit quiet for the rest. That changes the work more than people expect. The deadline is not "soon" — it is a date. Water has to be on and working the day people arrive, and shut down properly the day the last of them leaves.
Neither is cause for worry. They just mean the plumber ought to slow down, look first, and plan the job around the house rather than the other way round.
What we get called for here
- Leaks traced and repaired in finished, older homes
- Failed valves, seized shut-offs and tired old pipe
- New bathrooms and powder rooms in houses built without them
- Fixture swaps where the old rough-in doesn't match the new fitting
- Spring open-ups and fall shutdowns on seasonal properties
- Water heaters, drains and everything else a house needs
Older Homes
Three generations of pipe
in one basement
Stand under an older house here and you can usually read its history off the floor joists. A heavy cast iron drain stack. A run of galvanized steel from when the house first got proper indoor plumbing. Copper from a renovation somewhere in the middle. Plastic supply lines feeding a bathroom that went in far more recently. All of it tied together — sometimes neatly, sometimes with whatever fitting happened to be in somebody's truck that afternoon.
Every material fails in its own way, and the joins between them are where the trouble usually starts.
Cast iron drains
Corrode from the bottom of the pipe, where the water actually sits. A stack can look sound from the side and be paper-thin underneath.
Galvanized steel supply
Rusts closed from the inside out. The pipe looks fine, but the bore has narrowed and the upstairs shower has nothing behind it.
Copper
Generally sound. The weak point is where it meets something else — copper bolted straight to steel corrodes at the fitting unless there's a dielectric union between them.
Plastic supply lines
Fine work when it's done right, and often the sensible way to add on. It still has to be supported, protected and transitioned properly where it picks up from the old.
The other thing you can't assume in a house like this is that anything shuts off. Old valves seize. A stop under a sink that nobody has turned in forty years may not turn now, and if it does turn it may not seal. Before we cut into anything we find out what genuinely holds water and what only looks like it does — because finding out afterwards means a wet floor in a room you care about.
Careful Work
Opening as little as we can
In a house where the finishes matter — original trim, plaster, wide floorboards, paper somebody chose carefully — the repair is only half the job. The other half is getting to it without leaving a scar that outlasts the leak.
That means working out access before a tool comes off the truck. The best opening is the one made from the side nobody looks at: up through the basement ceiling, in through the back of a closet or a cupboard, from the spare room rather than the front hall. One hole in the right place beats three exploratory ones in the wrong place, so we spend the time first tracing where the pipe actually runs.
It also means being straight with you about the trade-off. Chasing a leak the tidy way sometimes takes longer, and costs more in labour, than opening the wall and patching it afterwards. We will lay out both, with what each one involves, and you decide. It is your plaster.
If your property carries any kind of heritage designation, say so when you call. Anything that shows on the outside of the building — a vent termination, an outside tap, a new penetration through the wall — is worth sorting out on paper before it is cut, not after.
Drop sheets down, boots covered, mess cleaned up before we leave. That should go without saying anywhere. In a house with a floor that old, it is worth saying out loud.
How we work in a finished home
- Trace the run before cutting anything
- Work from the unfinished side wherever it's possible
- One considered opening rather than several guesses
- Tell you the finish-work cost before we start, not after
- Floors and furniture covered, and the site left clean
New Fixtures
Adding a bathroom to a house
that was never designed for one
Older houses were built with one bathroom, or with none at all and a room converted later. Putting another one in is one of the jobs we are asked about most in St. Andrews, and homeowners are usually surprised by which half of it is difficult.
It is not the water. Hot and cold supply lines are small and can be threaded around most obstacles without much drama.
The drain and the vent decide everything. A drain has to fall — a steady, consistent slope the whole way to wherever it joins the rest of the system — and it has to get there through floor joists that cannot simply be cut wherever the layout would like. A toilet needs a bigger line than a sink and has less height to spare. And every fixture needs a vent, or water leaving one trap will pull the seal out of another and you will smell the drain in the room you just finished paying for.
So the first visit is not about tile. It is a look underneath: which way the joists run, where the existing stack is, how much fall there is to work with, and what is directly below the spot you have in mind. Sometimes the answer is the bathroom you want, exactly where you want it. Sometimes it is a couple of feet over against a different wall — a far better job, and much less of the house disturbed. Either way it is better to hear it before anything is ordered.
The same thinking applies to a straight swap. Pulling out an old cast iron tub or a wall-hung sink often uncovers a rough-in that sits nowhere near where a modern fitting expects it, and that is a normal part of the job in a house this age rather than a surprise. We would rather find it on the first visit than on the morning the new one is meant to go in.
What we look at first
- Where the drain can run, and how much fall it has
- Joist direction, and what can and can't be cut
- Where the vent goes and where it terminates
- What sits in the ceiling of the room below
- Whether the existing supply can carry another bathroom
Seasonal Properties
Open it in spring,
shut it down in fall
For a property that isn't lived in year-round, plumbing runs on a calendar rather than on demand. Two visits a year, done properly, prevent most of what otherwise turns into an emergency.
Spring open-up
Before anyone arrives
- Bring the water on slowly and watch it, instead of all at once
- Walk every fixture and every joint under pressure before leaving
- Refill traps and prime floor drains so nothing smells
- Put the water heater back in service and confirm it heats
- Check whatever sat idle all winter — shut-offs, hoses, pump and tank if there is one
- Flag anything that should be fixed now rather than mid-season
Fall shutdown
After the last visit of the year
- Shut the supply off at the source and drain the system down
- Drain the water heater and take it out of service
- Clear the runs that don't fall to a low point on their own
- Empty toilets and tanks, and protect the traps
- Deal with outside taps and anything else exposed
- Leave a note of what needs doing before it opens again
Why the fall visit is the one that matters
A line that lets go in a house somebody is living in gets noticed within minutes. The same line in a closed-up house runs until something else stops it, and nobody walks through the door until spring. That is the whole difference between a repair and a rebuild.
It is also the strongest argument we know for having a shutdown done properly rather than quickly. Half-drained is not drained. If a system is left with water sitting in a low spot or a fixture that was missed, the freeze finds it.
The other half of the calendar is booking. If a property has to be ready for a particular date — family coming, or people booked in to stay — give us the date when you call, not the week before it. Spring and fall are the busy ends of the year for exactly this reason, and the properties that get looked after on time are the ones that got into the book early.
Nearby
The rest of the county
St. Andrews is one stop on a run that covers most of Charlotte County. If you are in one of these instead, there's a page for it.
St. Andrews
Old house, or a house
waiting on a date?
Call and describe it. Roughly how old the building is, what it's doing, and whether anybody is living in it right now — that's usually enough for us to tell you what the job involves and when we can get there.
506-321-6782Mon–Fri 8:00am–5:00pm · emergency call-outs by arrangement