Your house is old. So are we.
Seventy-four years fixing the plumbing and heating in Milwaukee’s bungalows, duplexes and Polish flats. Cast iron, galvanized, steam boilers and lead service lines. Whatever is behind your basement wall, we’ve opened up one like it.
- 1952Walter opens the shop
- 3generations on the trucks
- Hourlyand honest about it
- South Sideto Shorewood
We know your house before we see it.
Milwaukee built the same few kinds of houses for sixty years, and each one has the same few problems. Tell us which one you live in and we can usually guess what we’ll find.
Bungalow
1910s–1930s- Cast iron stack in a closet wall
- Galvanized supply, low pressure upstairs
- Clay lateral out to the street
Polish flat
1890s–1920s- A cottage jacked up for a basement unit
- Two kitchens on one stack
- Drains sized for one family, serving two
Upper & lower
1900s–1940s- Two of everything, one main
- Steam or hot-water boiler in the basement
- Shared shutoffs nobody can find
East Side Victorian
1880s–1900s- Lead service line from the curb
- Old steam heat, one-pipe
- Three remodels of plumbing in one wall
The “& Sons” is not a figure of speech.
Stan Kowalczyk
Walter’s son. Ran the shop for thirty-eight years. Semi-retired, still answers the phone on Saturdays and still knows every boiler on Lincoln Avenue.
Mike Kowalczyk
Stan’s son and the master plumber on the license. Does the estimates, the boilers and anything involving a cast iron stack.
Danny Kowalczyk
Mike’s son, second-year apprentice, registered with the state. If you get Danny, you also get Mike.
“My grandfather opened the shop with one truck and a pipe threader. We still have the threader. We also still do it the way he did: you see the problem before you pay to fix it.” Mike Kowalczyk
By the hour, and we’ll tell you why.
Flat-rate pricing works when every job looks the same. In a 1920s house, nothing does. A drain that should take an hour sometimes turns out to be a cracked hub behind plaster, and a flat price has to charge everybody for that possibility. Hourly means you pay for what your house actually needed.
Before we open a wall or cut a pipe, we tell you what we think it is and roughly how long it takes. If it turns out bigger, we stop and call you.
Is your water line made of lead?
A lot of Milwaukee houses built before the 1950s still get their water through a lead pipe from the curb. You can usually check it yourself in about a minute, in the basement where the water line comes through the wall.
- Find the pipe coming through the front wall, before the meter.
- Scratch it gently with a key or a coin.
- If it’s soft, dull grey and the scratch turns shiny silver, and a magnet won’t stick, it’s probably lead.
Milwaukee Water Works runs a replacement program for the part on your property, and what it costs you depends on the program’s current funding. Call them first. If you’d rather hire us directly, we coordinate the city side with them. More on lead lines →
The scratch test
What you’re likely looking at, by what the scratch shows:
Iron, brass, copper and patience.
Some of them since the sixties.
Stan fixed my mother’s boiler in 1984. Mike fixed mine last winter. Same company, same honesty, and they still show up when they say.
Mike explained exactly why the stack was leaking before he touched it, gave me a time estimate, and came in under it.
No heat on a Sunday in January, ten below. Danny and his dad were here in two hours. Worth every dollar of the after-hours charge.
Mon–Fri, 7 to 5. No-heat calls any hour.
Or use the form
Licensed in the City of Milwaukee.
The old-house plumber’s site, built in seven days.
Sixteen pages: house types drawn by hand, three generations of the family, an honest hourly rate explained, and a lead service line page written for Milwaukee.