It’s a jungle out there. When we returned home to a flooded house, we began our search for quality plumber work to remedy our problem. This was when things really got confusing.

We started off with a simple Google search for local businesses and contractors available for plumber work and found a myriad of results. We had already decided that we didn’t want to use a large company. The only trouble is, we realized, that you never know just how big or small an operation is just be looking at its name. The only way you can know for sure that you’re dealing with an individual plumbing contractor before you call is that the plumbing outfit is just a simple name, like John Doe Plumbing. For what it’s worth, we were more comfortable with an individual with an actual business name. We learned to look for things like “LLC” to denote that these were the small, one-man operations we were looking for to do our plumber work. But there’s plenty of Inc., locations too.

We knew it was awfully superficial to make our decisions for plumber work on such petty criteria, but what else did we have to go on? We don’t know many people on our side of town to recommend a good candidate for plumber work, and there aren’t any good free review sites that we know of. So we were left with our search bar and our gut instincts.

A Second Opinion: Ask a Master Plumber

As much as we wanted to pick one local plumber and stick with our decision, we called up four different local plumbers (who were also licensed plumbers and master plumbers) who seemed reputable and organized. We asked each of them to come to our house, diagnose the problem, propose a solution to prevent any future complications, and give us an estimate. Honestly, we weren’t sure just how much master plumbers are willing to compete with one another for plumber work, so we didn’t tell them that we had others giving plumbing repair estimates. The last thing we wanted was for a plumber to make false promises of low prices or cut corners just to win the job.

The first two licensed plumbers quoted some very high prices and extensive plumbing repairs, and the second two gave us more modest estimates as well as an optimistic outlook for a lot of the equipment that the others wanted to replace. The third plumber won the bid.

With the candidate now selected, it was time to get down to business.

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