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Type your ZIP to see if it’s on our list, then read what usually goes wrong in the buildings on your block.
Chicago Plumbworks sets plumbing visits across the city of Chicago. For plumbing, the building tells a plumber more than the neighborhood. A 1920s bungalow on the Northwest Side and one on the Southwest Side have much the same basement, while a greystone two-flat next to a new condo has very different pipes.
So the sections below are grouped by side of the city, with the building types you’ll find there and the plumbing jobs those buildings tend to need. Every plumbing service on the site is available across these areas. Rather write than call? Send a request with the address.
Greystone two-flats along the boulevards and the side streets off them. The sewer laterals here are old, often clay, and they run under parkways lined with big trees, so a main line that backs up every spring usually has roots in it.
Brick bungalow country. Many of these basements have a floor drain sitting below the street sewer, and some owners have already moved to an overhead sewer. After a cloudburst the calls are about water at the floor drain, a catch basin that hasn’t been cleaned in years, or an overhead pump that stopped.
Two-flats and three-flats, many with a garden apartment below. A bathroom in that lower unit often drains into an ejector pit, and when the pump fails the tenant downstairs is the one who finds out first.
The University of Illinois Chicago’s City Design Center counted about 1,700 historic greystones in North Lawndale, most of them built between 1890 and 1915 and most of them two-flats. Buildings that age can still have original drain lines and a lead water line at the meter, and a rehab is the moment to replace both.
Worker cottages and small frame houses, some with rear additions built over crawl spaces. Those additions, and any pipe run along an outside wall, freeze first when the temperature drops below zero for a few days.
Courtyard buildings, condos and older single-family homes. A lot of the calls start before a closing, when a buyer wants the sewer scoped and the camera footage in hand before signing.
Larger single-family houses with deep basements, sump pits and mature trees over the yard. A sump pump that quits during a long rain, or roots that find the sewer under the lawn, are the usual reasons for a call.
The bungalow belt curves around the outer neighborhoods of the city from the Northwest Side to the Southwest Side, so the same full basements, floor drains and front-wall water meters turn up here too.
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