How the shop runs
Dale Whitcomb is a journeyman plumber and has run this business for 17 years out of Puyallup, Washington. The crew is 3 people: Dale, one journeyman and one apprentice, in two vans. There is no office staff and no answering service.
That is worth saying plainly, because it is the reason a small shop is hard to reach. When all three of us are under a house or behind a wall, the phone rings out. Calls get missed, voicemails pile up, and the customer with a running toilet books whoever picked up first. Nobody chose that, it is just what happens when the people doing the work are the same people answering the phone.
So the schedule lives on this site instead of in someone's head. The windows you see are the windows that are genuinely open, the prices are ranges rather than invented certainties, and a request holds a slot until Dale confirms it. That last part is not automated and never will be: a booking is only real once the shop has said yes.
How we price work
Every job gets a range, not a number, until somebody has looked at it. A drain that clears in twenty minutes and a drain that turns out to be a collapsed line under the driveway both start as the same phone call, and pretending otherwise just moves the bad news to the end of the visit.
The diagnostic fee is $89 and it comes off the bill when we do the repair on the same visit. After-hours emergency callout is $195 and it is applied to the repair rather than added to it. If your address falls in the extended part of our service area there is a $45 travel fee, and you hear about it before we drive out, not on the invoice.
What we will not do
We do not sell maintenance plans. We do not quote a repipe over the phone. We do not take a job in a town that would put a van 40 minutes away from everyone else booked that day, because the cost of that lands on the next customer rather than on us. When somewhere is out of range we say so and name a shop closer to you.