Plumber in Boston.

The Boston housing stock Matt sees most is the workhorse kind — triple-deckers and two-families, converted condos, and the occasional brownstone with a hundred and forty years of alterations layered into it. Original cast iron waste is still common, and so is the habit of routing something new through whatever gap was available at the time.

The complication in the city is almost never the repair itself. It is that the repair sits inside a building with other people in it: shared waste stacks, shared shutoffs, a basement somebody else has filled, and a schedule that has to work for more than one household. Worth saying plainly on the phone which floor you are on and whether you can get to the main shutoff.