Whole-house repipe in an occupied home in Garner

The scope

A 1988 two storey house in Garner plumbed in polybutylene, which was standard for its decade and has been failing everywhere since. The owners had already had two pinhole failures, one of which took out a section of ceiling.

They wanted the whole system replaced, and they could not move out to have it done.

The challenge

Polybutylene does not fail predictably. It degrades from the inside, usually at the fittings, and the next failure is as likely to be behind a finished wall as under the house. That is why patching it is a losing strategy: you are always repairing the joint that failed rather than the one that is about to.

The real difficulty on this job was that the house stayed occupied. Two adults working from home, two children in school, one bathroom that had to work every evening.

A repipe with everyone still living there is a scheduling problem more than a plumbing one. Water off for eight hours in the middle of a working day is fine if it is planned and disastrous if it is a surprise.

What we did

Sean Ferriday planned it as four days of work with water restored every single evening, and that plan was written down and given to the owners before anything started.

New PEX runs from a labelled manifold, routed through the crawlspace and up through interior walls rather than exterior ones, which matters in a climate with occasional hard freezes. Every fixture got its own shutoff at the manifold, so a future repair isolates one bathroom rather than the house.

Access was cut deliberately rather than opportunistically: eleven small openings, all in places we could close cleanly, rather than opening whatever was convenient from below. Two of the eleven were in tiled areas and were cut from the adjoining closet instead.

While the walls were open we traced a slow leak the owners had suspected for a year and never found, at a fitting behind the upstairs shower valve. The shower valve and two taps were replaced at the same time, since the wall was open and doing it later would mean opening it again.

More on how we approach these is on the repiping page.

The outcome

Four working days on site inside one week, with water on every night. Pressure across the house is noticeably better because the new runs are correctly sized rather than uniformly undersized.

The drywall openings were patched by us and painted by the owners. The old polybutylene was left in place where it was not in the way, capped and disconnected, because pulling it out of finished walls would have meant opening far more than eleven holes.

Finished 20 March 2026.