Yeah, if it’s the last thing I ever do. So I’ve been telling you all about the new shop I was able to purchase and how it has a history of being a plumbing shop, but I never told you about the old shop and how we grew into it. Even worse was moving out.
Moving—one of the two things I hate to do. Number one is insulating. I don’t know how guys do that every day. Yeah, I know it’s gotten better with better products but damn... fiberglass.
We started moving product from the old shop to the new shop about five months ago. I thought it would take a couple of weekends with me and my big strong sons. One of my boys is 23 and the other will be 22 and yes they are big strong guys. Strength doesn’t seem to equal the attitude needed to get out of bed and help Dad move 38 years of plumbing stock. I mean OMG the stuff we have acquired over the years. The hardest part was what to throw out and what to keep.
Let’s start with the easy stuff, copper fittings. Like many of you, we do 99 percent of our copper work with pro-press fittings. I’m a big fan of Pro-Press. It’s an amazing product that is a time saver not only in installation but it eliminates for the most part the need to drain down a pipe to re-solder. The Master plumber I learned from used to love to say “I never had a leak, a few weeps but never a leak.” Well, I would like to say the same, but, every once in a while I’d get a bad fitting or didn’t clean it well enough. But with Press fittings, damn. Time savings is great. I once had to do a hot water heater the night before Christmas. Pressing the fittings was a like a Christmas miracle.
So back to the shop I pulled out fittings from under benches I had forgotten about, I’m taking milk crates full of ¾” Copper Street 45. Couplings, nineties and more. I’ll save some of it but I’ll never get around to using those fittings.
Ball valves—yikes! We use a company that private labels our name on the handle of the ball valve. Works well as we’ve had customers call and comment that they just purchased a new home and, “Your name is all over the valves in our basement.” Good advertisement. The problem is that my trucks had valves and, just as with the copper fittings, I have boxes of seat valves with our name on the handle and they are not press valves nor are they Lead Free. So here I am with forty or fifty valves I’ll never use. Sure, I’ll save some and the IPS valves I’ll keep, but man it gets me to find boxes of valves going to scrap.
Those are the standard fitting and valves, but the one that gets me the most are the specialty items that got purchased for a particular job and (for one reason or another) never got used. I found a McDonald Miller low water cut-off valve for a steam boiler still in the box and only nine years old. We do some steam work but man, that’s an expensive valve to have sitting around the shop.
How about a ten inch fan in the can for a multiple boiler installation? An employee who is no longer around purchased it and, as it turned out, the customer changed to high efficiency sealed combustion boilers and we never returned the intake fan. No one to blame but myself! I should have been more aware of what happened.
We had some china from different manufactures that we go stuck with, tanks and bowls from different brands. Specialty faucets that got pushed to the back of the shelves like a satin nickel pot filler with porcelain handles. I’m not even sure what job it was meant for but there it was, dirty and dusty in an open box.
Some of this is due to changes in the trade. In 1992 when George Bush signed the Energy policy act that mandated that all toilets needed to be 1.6 gallon flush, we decided we decided to carry low flush toilets. Every toilet manufacturer jumped to try and catch up with low flash toilets. Very few of the original ones worked well. We found one brand that worked well and started stocking them. Ten inch, twelve inch and fourteen inch rough. We did well since the other brands where so bad and we the good ones in stock. And, like a lot of tradesmen I had the thought we used them all up at some point. Wrong.
I have no one else to blame but myself. You can get carried away with stock really easily. I had an employee, Great Guy, who loved to bring back parts to the shop to show me what was wrong. I learned a lot from seeing the stuff he brought back but, damn, it never made it out to the dumpster. I found at least two old oil burners that he thought we might need to scavenge parts from in a late Saturday night call. Good idea, but it just gets cluttered up and never gets used. I think a lot of tradesmen have that mentality. Save parts because you never know when you’ll need them. You think you’ll pull out an obscure part and be the hero. One of my plumbers says he has parts all over his garage with the same idea that he’ll use them some day. Instead, you wind up like me with a shop full of old parts and left overs.
Left over parts and left over equipment. Man, I gotta get this stuff out here.
Scott Milne is the owner of Milne Plumbing and Heating. He and his company have been serving the greater Boston area for nearly 30 years. He specializes in high-efficiency heating systems for custom homes.