What a Repipe Actually Involves
The work starts at the main shutoff. We kill the water, cut the old main, and transition to PEX. From there we run a trunk and branch system through the attic, dropping down through the top plates of the walls to feed each fixture. Hot lines get one trunk, cold lines get another. Every branch is sized correctly for the fixture it serves. The pipe is secured every thirty two inches, kept off the attic floor, and insulated where code requires. The water heater gets new supply lines and a new shutoff. Every toilet, sink, tub, and shower gets a new angle stop. The old galvanized or copper stops come out. New quarter turn ball valve stops go in.
The old pipes stay in the slab. We do not dig them out. We cut and cap them at the source and abandon them in place. The new system runs overhead, which means future leaks, if they ever happen, will show up as a wet spot on the ceiling, not a mysterious warm spot on the floor. That is a huge advantage for maintenance. A leak in the attic is visible and repairable in an hour. A leak under a slab means jackhammering concrete and hoping you find the right spot. The switch to overhead PEX is not just about stopping the current leaks. It is about making every future plumbing issue a straightforward repair instead of a forensic investigation.
The job takes about a week for a typical one to two bath house. Water is off during the day while we work and back on at the end of each day, except for the final tie in day when it may be off longer. We protect floors, we keep the work area clean, and we do not leave debris behind. The drywall cuts are made clean and square so they are easy to patch. We do not bash holes with a hammer and call it access. Every opening is planned and minimal. The goal is to get the pipe in with the least damage to the house, and then close it back up so you are not staring at open walls for months.
Closing the Walls Back Up
Most plumbing quotes stop at the pipe. You pay for a repipe, and the plumber leaves, and you are standing in your bathroom looking at a hole in the drywall with a pipe sticking out of it. The plumber tells you to call a drywall guy. The drywall guy tells you he is three weeks out. You live with a hole. That is the standard way the trade handles it. We do not do it that way. Closing the walls back up is a posted line item, not a favor you have to negotiate. The labor to patch and paint the drywall openings we made is $150, and that includes the supply run for the materials. We do the work, we close the wall, and you are not left with a construction site.
The patch work is not a full texture match and repaint of the entire wall. It is a targeted repair of the access openings we cut. We tape, float, texture, and paint the patched area. The paint is matched as close as possible to the existing wall color. On older homes where the paint has faded, the match will not be perfect. We tell you that upfront. But the hole is closed, the wall is solid, and the repair is clean. If you want a full wall repaint to blend it perfectly, that is a painting contractor job and we will tell you so. What we will not do is leave you with an open cavity and a business card for someone else.
For access points that may need to be opened again someday, we offer an access panel install at $125 labor. This is a clean, serviceable panel that sits flush in the wall and gives future access to a valve or a junction without cutting drywall again. It is not a plastic snap in lid from the home center. It is a proper paintable access door that looks intentional. If the main shutoff or a manifold ends up behind a wall, an access panel is the right call. You can paint it to match the wall and it disappears. Years later when you need to get at the valve, you open a door instead of cutting sheetrock. That is how a repipe should be finished.
- Touch up paint and minor drywall fix: $150 labor, supply run included
- Access panel install, clean and serviceable: $125 labor, provisional
- We close every hole we open, no exceptions
- Texture and paint matched as close as possible to existing
- No open walls left behind, no third party runaround
The Main Service Line Question
While we are repiping the inside of the house, it makes sense to look hard at the main water service line from the meter to the house. If that line is the same age and material as the plumbing that is failing inside, it is on the same clock. A main line failure is a different kind of headache. It leaks underground, often goes unnoticed for weeks, and can rack up a water bill that makes you sick before you even know there is a problem. The posted labor for a main water service line replacement is $3250, provisional. Depth and distance change the number. A short run at eighteen inches deep is one thing. A long run at four feet deep through caliche is another.
The decision to replace the main line at the same time as the interior repipe is a judgment call based on what the line is made of and what condition it is in. If the house was built with copper inside and the main is copper too, the odds of it developing pinholes are the same as the odds you are already dealing with inside. If the main is PVC or polyethylene in good shape, it may have many years left. We will tell you what we see when we expose the transition at the house. We do not upsell a main line replacement just because we are already there. If the line is sound, we say so. If it is on borrowed time, we tell you that too and let you decide.
Some houses have a slab leak that is not a pinhole in a branch line but a failure of the main line running under the slab. In that case, a slab leak reroute may be the better option than a full repipe. The posted labor for a slab leak reroute is $2150, provisional. We abandon the failed section under the slab and run a new line through the attic or a wall chase to reconnect the system. It is a targeted fix that solves an active leak without repiping the whole house. If the rest of the plumbing is sound, a reroute makes sense. If the rest of the plumbing is also failing, a full repipe is the right call. We lay out both options with the posted numbers and let you choose.
How the Cart and Deposit Work
On the homepage there is a price board and a drive gauge. You type your address or ZIP into the gauge and it tells you the round trip miles and the drive dollars before you talk to anyone. There is also a cart. You can add jobs from the price board, see the running total update as you go, and reserve your visit by paying the drive fee as a deposit. That deposit comes off the final bill. It is not an extra charge on top. It is just the drive dollars paid upfront to hold the slot, and then subtracted from what you owe when the work is done.
The cart lets you stack the work you need and see the real number. Add the repipe at $5500 labor. Add the main line replacement at $3250 labor if you are considering it. Add the drywall patch at $150 labor. Add the drive fee for your location, say $40 if you are in Belton. The cart shows you the sum. No phone call, no estimate appointment, no waiting for a number that may or may not be real. You see the posted labor, you see the parts cost at the supply house price, and you see the drive. That is the whole picture.
Paying the drive fee as a deposit locks in your spot on the schedule. If something changes and you need to reschedule, we move the deposit to the new date. If you cancel outright before we start work, the deposit is not refunded. That is because the drive already happened or the slot was held and turned away other work. We are upfront about that. The deposit is the drive fee, nothing more. It is not a percentage of the job, it is not a booking fee on top of the drive. It is exactly the round trip miles at a dollar a mile, and it comes off the final bill when the job is done.
The Real Cost of Waiting
Every slab leak that gets patched instead of fixed permanently does more damage. Water moves through the slab, wicks up into walls, and sits under flooring. Mold starts where you cannot see it. The repair cost of a single slab leak, once you factor in the leak detection, the jackhammer work, the pipe repair, and the concrete patch, often runs high enough to make you wince. Do that twice in two years and you have spent a serious chunk of what a full repipe costs, and you still have the same failing pipes in the ground waiting to leak again.
A repipe stops the bleeding. The $5500 posted labor is the number to make every pipe in the house new, from the main shutoff to the last fixture. No more pinholes. No more slab leaks. No more water bills that spike because a leak ran underground for three weeks before you noticed the warm spot on the tile. The work takes about a week, and when it is done the plumbing problem is solved, not just delayed. That is the difference between a patch and a repipe. One buys you time. The other buys you a new system that will outlast your time in the house.
If you are on the fence, look at your last two water bills. Look at the repairs you have already done. Add up what the leaks have cost you so far, including the drywall, the flooring, the mold remediation if it got that far. Then look at the posted number for a repipe. $5500 labor, plus parts at cost, plus the round trip drive from Killeen. For a house in Temple, that drive is $58. For a house in Georgetown, it is $90. The math is not complicated. The question is whether you want to keep paying for patches or pay once for a permanent fix. We are not here to push you either way. We are here to post the real numbers so you can make a real decision.