What Plumbing Is Actually Like

Walk me through last Wednesday. What happened?

Gloria, our dispatcher, she had me stacked with four calls before I even pulled out of the shop lot at 7:30. First one was a water heater swap in Broken Arrow, pretty standard. Second was a garbage disposal replacement in midtown. Third was supposed to be a toilet flange repair in Jenks. But then around 10:15, Gloria calls me on the radio and says she's bumping my third call because a lady on the south side has water coming up through her floor drains, and when the homeowner described the smell, Gloria used the word "aggressive." That's the call that took my whole afternoon.

The house was a 1940s bungalow off Peoria. Single-story, maybe 1,100 square feet. The kind of house where everything's been patched by somebody over the years and you never know what you're walking into until you get under it. The homeowner, she's probably 70, and she's got towels piled around the floor drain in her utility room. The smell hit me in the driveway. Sewer gas. Not the faint whiff you get from a dry trap. The full thing, like rotten eggs mixed with something alive.

What did you find?

Went under the house. This place has a crawl space, maybe 24 inches of clearance in the good spots. Some spots less. I'm on my back with a headlamp and I'm looking at the original cast iron drain lines from 1940-whatever, and somebody at some point, probably 15 years ago based on the condition of the rubber, had patched the main drain with rubber couplings. Fernco couplings, the black rubber ones with the stainless steel band clamps. Which, look, Ferncos are fine in certain applications. Underground, on a horizontal run, as a permanent repair on 80-year-old cast iron that's already scaling and pitting? Not great.

Three of the four couplings had failed. The rubber had degraded, the clamps were loose, and raw sewage was leaking at every joint. The cast iron itself had a section about 18 inches long where the bottom of the pipe had rotted out completely. You could see daylight through it if there'd been any daylight under there, which there wasn't, because it was a crawl space and I had a headlamp. I took a photo on my phone and sent it to Rudy, my foreman, and he called me back and said, "How much cast iron are we talking about?" I told him about 30 feet from the main stack to where it ties into the city sewer line under the foundation. He sighed. I could hear him doing math in his head.

What does that repair look like?

You're basically re-piping the entire main drain. Pull out the old cast iron, which is heavy, by the way. A 10-foot stick of 4-inch cast iron is about 45 pounds. And it's in a crawl space, so you can't stand up, you can't get a good grip, and every cut you make with the snap cutter sends vibrations through pipe that's been sitting there since Truman was president. You replace it with PVC or ABS, depending on code. In Tulsa we typically run ABS for drain lines. New hangers, new cleanouts, proper slope. You need a quarter inch of fall per foot on a 4-inch drain line. That doesn't sound like much until you're trying to maintain it over 30 feet in a crawl space where the floor joists aren't level because the house has settled over 80 years.

I wrote the estimate in the truck. Material cost was about $680 for pipe, fittings, hangers, and a new cleanout. Labor, I estimated 14 hours between me and my apprentice Dion. At our shop rate, the total came to around $3,400. The homeowner's face when I told her the number, I've seen that face a thousand times. It's the face people make when they realize the house is going to cost them money they weren't expecting to spend. She asked if there was a cheaper option. I told her we could patch the worst section for maybe $800, but I'd be putting a new coupling on pipe that's going to fail somewhere else within a year or two. She thought about it overnight. Called back Thursday morning and said to do the full replacement.

You mentioned an apprentice. What's it like training someone?

Dion's in his second year. Good kid, strong, asks questions, which is what you want. Some apprentices just want to be told what to do. Dion actually wants to understand why. Like on that cast iron job, he asked me why we couldn't just line the existing pipe instead of replacing it. Which is a legit question. Pipe lining is a thing, it works well in some situations. But the pipe was so far gone, with the bottom rotted out in sections, there was nothing to line against. You'd be putting a liner inside a pipe that's structurally gone. I explained that to him while we were both lying on our backs in a crawl space that smelled like a failed septic system, which, if you want to know what plumbing training is actually like, that's a pretty accurate snapshot.

The apprenticeship is four years here in Oklahoma. Classroom time at the local union hall or through the company, depending on whether you're union or open shop. We're open shop. Dion does his classroom hours through a program the company pays for, 144 hours a year. On the job, he's with me every day. First year, he mostly carried material, cleaned up, held things, watched. Second year, which is now, he's doing solvent welds on drain fittings, cutting pipe, digging. By third year he'll be doing water line repairs and basic fixture installs on his own while I handle the diagnosis and the customer interaction. Fourth year, he should be able to run a simple service call by himself with me available by phone.

Tell me about the gas station bathroom ratings.

OK so this started maybe three years ago. When you're a service plumber, you're in your truck all day driving between calls. And you need to stop. Especially if you've been drinking the 40-ounce gas station coffee that keeps you alive between jobs. You learn fast which bathrooms are worth stopping at and which ones are a health risk. My buddy at the shop, another tech named Dion, he started asking me "where should I stop on the south side" and I realized I had this whole mental map of clean bathrooms across Tulsa. So I just started keeping a list in my Notes app.

QuikTrip is the gold standard. They clean those bathrooms like they're prepping for a health inspection. The one on 71st and Memorial, I gave it a 9.4. Clean tile, working soap dispenser, no mysterious puddles. I've been to maybe 130 gas stations in the Tulsa metro area at this point and I have ratings for 87 of them. My wife Tammy thinks it's the funniest thing. She's a dental assistant, so she has her own version of judging professional cleanliness, but she keeps it to herself. I keep mine in a spreadsheet. Well, a note. Same thing.

How's the money in residential service?

My base is $32 an hour, which comes out to about $66,500 a year before overtime. I usually pick up 5 to 8 hours of overtime a week because we run an on-call rotation and emergencies don't respect the clock. With overtime, I'm in the $78,000 to $82,000 range. We also get a small spiff, $25 per call, when we sell additional work. Not a commission exactly, but it adds up. Maybe another $2,000 to $3,000 a year.

When I was at the distribution center before this, I was making $16.50 an hour. No overtime, no benefits worth anything, and the ceiling was maybe $19 an hour if I became a shift lead. Tammy and I were renting a two-bedroom apartment in Bixby and we couldn't save anything. Now we own a house. Nothing fancy, three-bed in Owasso, but it's ours. The trade gave us that. The four years of apprenticeship where I was making $14 an hour were rough, but Tammy was working through it and we made it work.

What's the hardest part of the job that people don't see?

Crawl spaces in July. Tulsa in July is 98 degrees with humidity that makes the air feel like you're breathing through a wet washcloth. Under a house, it's worse because there's no air movement. You're on your back, you're sweating into your eyes, your headlamp is fogging up, and you're trying to make a clean cut on a pipe that's 6 inches from the bottom of a floor joist. I've had days where I came out from under a house and my shirt was so soaked I could wring it out. Dion, his first July, he came out of a crawl space and sat on the homeowner's porch steps for ten minutes just staring at the sky. I asked if he was OK. He said, "I'm reconsidering my life choices." He was back under the house in fifteen minutes. He's going to be a good plumber.

What's yours?

You're in people's homes. Every day. And you see how people actually live. Not the version they show their friends. The real version. The version under the kitchen sink where there's black mold because the drain has been leaking for two years and they just kept putting a bucket under it. The bathroom where the wax ring failed six months ago and the subfloor is spongy and discolored. The hoarder house where you can barely get to the water heater because there are stacked boxes from floor to ceiling in every room.

And you don't say anything. You're not there to judge. You're there to fix the pipe. But you see it. You see the elderly woman living alone whose house is falling apart because she can't afford to maintain it and she doesn't have anyone to help. You see the family with three kids where the parents clearly can't afford the $1,200 repair but they need running water so they're going to figure it out. You see the guy who lives in a $400,000 house and can't be bothered to plunge his own toilet. All of them are your customers and you treat them all the same. But the ones who really can't afford it, those calls stay with you. I did a water line repair last winter for an older couple, $1,800. The husband asked if he could do payments. We don't normally do that. I talked to Rudy and he approved three installments. I think about that job sometimes. Whether they're doing OK.

How did you go from making lattes to roughing in waste stacks?

My roommate at the time, this was 2020, he was a second-year apprentice with UA Local 290. I was managing a coffee shop on Hawthorne, making like $38,000 a year with tips. Good tips, actually. Portland tips well for coffee. But I was 22 and I could see exactly where that job went, which was nowhere different. Same shop, same drinks, same ceiling. My roommate was two years in and already making more than me, and he kept talking about the work in this way that made it sound like building something real. Pipe going into a building that people would live in. That stuck with me.

Applied to the apprenticeship through the union hall. The aptitude test was basic math and mechanical reasoning. Reading comprehension. I scored well enough to get an interview. The interview panel was three journeymen and a training coordinator. They asked why I wanted to do this. I told them the truth: I wanted to build things and make real money. They appreciated that I didn't give them some story about my grandfather being a plumber. I got accepted, started in September 2020. First day on a job site, I carried 4-inch cast iron soil pipe up three flights of stairs for six hours. My arms were shaking by lunch. The journeyman I was with, a guy named Cliff, he looked at me and said, "Tomorrow's going to be the same." He was right.

Tell me about the Thursday with the 47 units.

This was about two months ago. We're on a 6-story mixed-use building in the Pearl District. Ground floor is retail, floors two through six are apartments. 47 units total across those five residential floors. My crew is me, another journeyman, and two apprentices. Shane is our foreman, he's been with the company 18 years and he runs the plumbing scope for the whole building.

We were starting the rough-in, which means running the waste lines, vent stacks, and water supply before drywall goes in. On a building like this, you work from the drawings. The architect's mechanical drawings show you where every fixture connects, where the waste stacks go, where the vents tie in, where the water lines run. You lay it out, you install it, the inspector comes and looks at it, and then the drywall guys close it up and nobody ever sees your work again. Unless something goes wrong.

Thursday morning, Shane pulls us together and says we need to start the waste stacks on floors three and four. So I go up to three with the drawings and I start laying out the first stack. And I'm measuring off the structural penetrations, which are the holes that were left in the concrete floors for our pipe to pass through, and something's not right. The drawing shows the 4-inch waste stack centered 14 inches off the east wall. The penetration in the concrete is 18 inches off the east wall. Four-inch difference. On one floor, maybe you work around it. But this penetration was wrong on every floor, three through six. Someone, either the structural engineer or the concrete crew, put every hole 4 inches east of where the architect drew it.

What do you do with that?

You stop. That's the first thing. You don't start installing pipe and hope it works out. Shane got on the phone with Pete, the GC's superintendent. Pete came up to the third floor with the drawings. He looked at the penetrations, he looked at the drawings, and he said a word I won't repeat. Then he called the architect.

This is the part of commercial plumbing that nobody outside the trade understands. A huge percentage of the job is coordination, not pipe fitting. You're coordinating with the GC, the structural engineer, the architect, the electricians, the HVAC crew. Everybody's pipe and conduit has to fit in the same walls and ceilings. When something's off by 4 inches, it affects everybody downstream. If we move our waste stack 4 inches, our fixture connections change, our vent locations change, and now we might be in the way of the electrical conduit that's supposed to run through the same stud bay.

It took two days to sort out. The architect issued a revised drawing. We ended up using offset fittings to connect to the existing penetrations rather than core-drilling new ones, because new penetrations in a post-tension concrete slab are extremely expensive and the GC didn't want to eat that cost. Shane figured out a way to make it work using a pair of 22-and-a-half degree offsets on each floor that brought the stack back to where it needed to be at the fixture level. Saved the project probably $15,000 in re-work. Pete bought us lunch, which on a union job is about the highest compliment a GC super can give.

What does the day-to-day feel like on a commercial job?

Repetitive in a way that's satisfying if you like systems. On the apartment floors, you're doing the same rough-in 47 times. Each unit gets a kitchen sink, a dishwasher connection, a bathroom with a toilet, lavatory, and tub/shower. Some units have a second bath. The piping layout is basically identical for every unit on the same floor plan, with minor variations for the corner units.

I start at 7:00. Union hours, 7 to 3:30 with a half-hour lunch. First thing is setting up materials. I'll pull the fittings I need for the day from the gang box, which is the big job-site toolbox. Lay out the pipe. On a rough-in day, I'm cutting and assembling maybe 80 to 100 feet of DWV pipe per unit. That's drain, waste, and vent, which is the system that carries everything away from the fixtures to the main building drain. The pipe is ABS here in Oregon. You cut it with a chop saw, deburr the ends, dry-fit everything to check your layout, then solvent-weld it. The cement sets in about 30 seconds, so you get one shot. If the fitting goes on crooked, you're cutting it out and starting over. That's a $4 fitting and 20 minutes of your time. Not the end of the world, but it adds up if you're sloppy.

Tell me about the pipe photography thing.

It started on a renovation job in my second year. We were demo-ing the plumbing in an old brewery in Southeast that was being converted to office space. The existing copper supply lines had been installed in the 1920s and the manifold where they all connected was this beautiful thing. Probably 30 copper pipes coming together in a pattern that looked like, I don't know, like an organ or something. Like a musical instrument. The craftsmanship was unreal. Whoever did that work a hundred years ago took pride in it. Every line was straight, every solder joint was clean, and the whole thing was turning green with patina.

I took a photo and posted it on Instagram. Got like 200 likes, which for an account that had maybe 60 followers was a lot. Then I started noticing pipe everywhere. The mechanical room in a 1960s high-rise that had this enormous cast iron waste system running through it like a root system. A perfectly graded copper line in a residential basement that some old-timer had installed with museum-level precision. Kim, my girlfriend, she thinks it's hilarious. She says I'm the only person she knows who stops in the middle of a hardware store to photograph the pipe display. But the account is at 4,200 followers now and most of them are other tradespeople. Plumbers, pipefitters, HVAC guys. People who understand why a well-done piece of pipe work is worth looking at. Artie, my union rep, told me he showed the account to the apprenticeship coordinator as an example of "pride in the trade." Which I guess it is, even if I mostly started it because I thought that brewery manifold looked cool.

How does the money work in the union?

My journeyman rate through Local 290 is $52.18 an hour on the check. That's the wage. On top of that, the contractor pays into my pension, my health insurance, my annuity, and the training fund. The total package is around $82 an hour. I don't see all of that directly, but the health insurance alone is worth probably $15,000 a year and I pay zero out of pocket for it. Zero premium, zero deductible for in-network. Kim is on my plan. When she needed an MRI last year, we paid nothing. She couldn't believe it.

On the check, working 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, I gross about $104,000. With overtime, which happens on bigger projects, I've hit $115,000. I'm 28. I have no student debt. I have a pension building. When I was making lattes four years before the apprenticeship started, I was splitting rent four ways and eating ramen that wasn't ironic. The financial trajectory of this career is the thing I wish someone had explained to me when I was 18 and everyone was talking about college like it was the only door.

You ever miss coffee?

I miss the social part of it. Making drinks, talking to regulars, the morning rush where you're just in the zone for two hours straight. I was good at it. The latte art, the pour-overs, the whole thing. But I don't miss making $17 an hour while the owner of the shop drove a BMW. I don't miss the health insurance that cost me $280 a month with a $4,000 deductible. I don't miss the feeling of being 24 and knowing that the ceiling was right there. I'd rather be lying on a concrete deck at 6:45 in the morning fitting a closet flange than pulling my third espresso shot for someone who's about to complain that the foam is too thick. That might change when my knees give out. But right now, no contest.

What's yours?

The hierarchy on a job site, and how invisible you are to the people making the decisions. On this 6-story building, there's a developer, an architect, a general contractor, and then us. The subs. We do the work that makes the building function, the plumbing, the electrical, the HVAC, and we're also the first ones to get squeezed when the schedule slips. Pete, the GC super, he's a decent guy, but when the developer pushes the move-in date up by two weeks, Pete doesn't call the architect. He calls Shane and says, "Can your guys work Saturdays for the next month?" And Shane says yes because if he says no, the next project goes to a different mechanical contractor.

There's also the physical stuff that accumulates. I'm 28 and my knees already talk to me in the morning. I wear knee pads every day, good ones, the ProKnees with the gel inserts. But six years of kneeling on concrete, climbing ladders with 30 pounds of pipe on your shoulder, reaching overhead to hang pipe from hangers, that adds up. Shane is 48 and he walks with a limp he didn't have ten years ago. He doesn't complain about it. Nobody does. You just buy better knee pads and take ibuprofen and keep going. But I notice it. And I think about it more than I probably should for someone who's only been doing this six years.

How do you go from retail management to master plumber?

I was managing a Kohl's in Chesterfield. I was 25. I'd been there five years, worked my way up from seasonal cashier to department manager. And I was good at it, the scheduling, the people stuff, the inventory. But the pay topped out around $38,000 and the hours were insane during the holidays, and I remember standing in the store one Saturday in November thinking "I'm going to be doing this when I'm 40." That thought scared me more than anything else I could think of.

My uncle Frank had a plumbing company. Small, just him and one helper. He'd been a plumber for 30 years. I grew up around it. Holiday dinners, he'd be talking about jobs, and I always thought it sounded more interesting than what I was doing. I called him and said, "Would you teach me?" He laughed, not in a mean way, more like a surprised way. Then he said, "Show up Monday at 7." That was it. No formal interview, no aptitude test. Just "show up Monday."

What was Monday like?

He had me dig a trench. Six feet long, two feet wide, three feet deep, for a water line repair at a house in Midlothian. It was March in Virginia, which means the ground was cold and partly frozen. He gave me a shovel and a pickaxe and said, "Dig until you hit the pipe." I dug for four hours. My hands blistered through the work gloves. When I found the pipe, he came over, looked at it, and said, "Good. Now watch." And he repaired a split copper water line in about 20 minutes. Cleaned the pipe, applied flux, soldered the fitting, pressure-tested it. When water came back on and there was no leak, he looked at me and said, "That's the job. You find the problem, you fix the problem, you make sure it holds." Then we had lunch in the truck and he quizzed me on pipe sizes.

For the next four years I was his helper, then his apprentice. Virginia requires 6,000 hours of supervised work and 240 hours of classroom before you can take the journeyman exam. Uncle Frank was patient, mostly. He had a temper when things went wrong, especially if it was because someone didn't measure twice. He used to say, "Measure twice, cut once, and if you cut it wrong, you're buying the fitting." I bought a lot of fittings that first year.

Walk me through the Monday with the restaurant.

This was about six weeks ago. Darlene, my sister, she runs our office. Phones, scheduling, invoicing, all of it. She's the reason the business side functions because I am not a paperwork person. She calls me at 11:15 and says a restaurant, a pretty well-known place in Carytown, has sewage backing up into their kitchen during the lunch rush. The health department is going to shut them down if they don't fix it by end of day. I was in the middle of a bathroom renovation for Mrs. Bellweather, one of my regulars, so I left Ernie, my lead tech, to finish setting the toilet and I drove to Carytown.

The restaurant manager met me at the back door. You could smell it from the parking lot. The kitchen floor had about an inch of standing water that was not clean water. The cooks were standing on rubber mats that were basically islands. The manager looked like he was going to cry. This is a Monday lunch, they probably had 40 or 50 people in the dining room, and the kitchen is backing up with sewage.

What was causing it?

Grease. Nine times out of ten with restaurants, it's grease. They have a grease trap, which is supposed to catch the fats and oils before they get into the drain line. But grease traps need to be pumped regularly. This restaurant was supposed to have theirs pumped every three months. I pulled the lid off the trap and it was full. I mean full to the brim. Solidified grease on top, liquid underneath, and the outlet line was 100% blocked. Nothing was getting through.

But the grease trap being full was only half the problem. The 4-inch drain line downstream of the trap, the one that runs under the floor to the main sewer, had a belly in it. A belly is a sag in the pipe where it dips below grade and creates a low spot. Water and waste sit in that low spot instead of flowing through. Over time, grease that gets past the trap accumulates in the belly. This line had probably a 6-inch belly over a 12-foot run. That belly had been collecting grease for, I'd guess, years. The combination of the full trap and the clogged belly was what caused the backup.

I called a grease trap pumping company and they came out within an hour. Got the trap emptied. Then I ran my Ridgid K-7500 drum machine through the downstream line, which is a drain cleaning machine that uses a steel cable with a cutting head to clear blockages. The amount of grease that came out of that line was, I want to say impressive, but that's not the right word. It was a solid plug of congealed cooking grease about 8 feet long. My gloves were coated. My boots were coated. The smell was, you know, it's rancid grease mixed with decomposing food waste. It's not something you forget.

You're one of the few women who owns a plumbing business in your area. What's that been like?

The first ten years, it was a constant thing. Not always hostile, but always present. Homeowners would open the door and ask where the plumber was. I'd say, "I'm the plumber." Some of them would laugh. Some of them would ask if there was someone else they could talk to. I had one guy, this was early on, maybe my third year, he called the office and specifically asked for "a real plumber" after I gave him an estimate. Darlene took that call. She told him our estimate stood and if he wanted another opinion, he was welcome to call someone else. He called someone else. They charged him $400 more than my quote. He did not call back.

At this point, 22 years in, I've got my master license, I own the business, and I have a customer base that knows my work. Mrs. Bellweather has been my client for 14 years. She's never once questioned whether I could fix something. But I still get it occasionally from new customers. A guy last month looked at me when I crawled out from under his house and said, "You actually do the work yourself?" Like I was going to stand there and supervise in white gloves. I told him yes, and I'd found his problem. He didn't bring it up again.

How does the business side work?

We did about $620,000 in revenue last year. That's me, Ernie, and a part-time apprentice, plus Darlene handling the office. After material costs, insurance, truck payments, gas, Darlene's salary, the apprentice, workers' comp, liability insurance, and all the other stuff that eats into revenue, my take-home was around $135,000. Which is solid. Better than I ever made working for someone else. But there's no safety net. When the work slows down, which it does in January and February, I still have to make payroll. I still have to pay the insurance premiums. I still have the truck note. Uncle Frank told me when I took over: "Owning a plumbing business is a plumbing job and an accounting job and a sales job all at once. You have to be at least decent at all three."

He was right. I spend maybe 30 hours a week in the field and another 15 on the business side. Estimating jobs, ordering material, reviewing Darlene's invoicing, planning the schedule, dealing with the occasional difficult customer. When Uncle Frank retired four years ago, I bought the business from him for $80,000 on a five-year payment plan. I've got one year left on that. Ernie's been with me for nine years. He's a journeyman. Reliable, good hands, doesn't talk much, which is fine with me. He shows up at 7:15 every morning and he does the work right. When you have a three-person shop, one bad employee can sink you. Ernie is the opposite of a bad employee.

What's in the jar on your desk?

The hall of fame. Every weird thing I've pulled from a drain line over 22 years. The Hot Wheels car was first, from a kitchen drain in Bon Air. Kid had shoved it down the garbage disposal. Red Corvette. The golf ball came from a toilet line at a house near the Country Club of Virginia, which felt appropriate. The dentures, those are the prize. Pulled them from a 3-inch drain in a retirement community. The resident called and said her toilet was flushing slow. I ran a camera down the line and there they were, sitting in the pipe about 8 feet from the toilet, grinning at the camera. She said she'd lost them six months earlier and had already gotten a new set. Told me to keep them.

Darlene wanted me to throw them out. I told her they were a conversation piece. When new clients come to the office, they always notice the jar. The GI Joe is in there too, pulled that from a bathtub drain. And a rusty padlock from a main drain at an old school building we did a job at. How a padlock gets into a drain line, I genuinely don't know. But it was there, and now it's in the jar.

What's yours?

The loneliness of owning a small trade business. People see the truck with your name on it and they think you've made it. And in some ways, yeah, I have. I own the company. I have a master license. I answer to myself. But there's nobody to talk to when a big job goes sideways. No partner, no board, no mentor who's been through the same thing. Uncle Frank retired. He'll take my call, but he's 72 and he's done. Ernie is my employee, not my peer. Darlene understands the office, not the field. I'm the only person in the building who can look at a set of drawings and price a job. If I'm wrong on the estimate, we eat it. If I'm sick and can't work, the revenue stops. If Ernie leaves, I'm doing every call by myself until I find somebody else.

And then there's the weight of being a woman in this trade who's trying to prove that a woman-owned plumbing company can be as good as anyone else's. Not better, not a novelty, just as good. That pressure never fully goes away. I don't have bad months because "business is slow." I have bad months and then a voice in the back of my head says, "Is it because they'd rather call a guy?" It's probably not. Probably it's just January. But the thought is there. It's been there for 22 years. I don't talk about it much. Ernie doesn't know. Darlene probably suspects. But it's just mine to carry, and most days I carry it fine. Some days it's heavier than a 10-foot stick of cast iron.