Pulling the Trigger

My daughter Stef set down her coffee mug. Her soft, pretty face was stern. “You need to pull the trigger on this, Mom,” she said.

She sounded just like her father, my late husband. “You need to get with the program,” was his advice in any crisis.

The crisis that morning was how to replace our intake pipes — the 70-year-old underground system that delivered water to our house near Kāneʻohe and which had collapsed eight months earlier.

“This is just a band-aid,” warned the handyman in April as he patched our crumbling lifeline. “It’ll last six months, tops.”

It was now December 2023, and the pipes were ready to burst.

Piled around us were proposals from many O‘ahu plumbers. They all had good references, and they all said the same thing:

“Most Hawai‘i homes built in the 1950s, like yours, were built with galvanized steel pipes. The steel is coated with zinc to protect the pipes from rust and corrosion. This doesn’t work. All your intake pipes are falling apart and need to be replaced now.”

What separated the plumbers were their bids. These ranged from about $9,000 to nearly $34,000.

Their replacement proposals were equally puzzling — from jackhammering a new system into the floor to running pipes up into the attic to snaking pipes through the walls to mounting pipes outside under the roof.

“If you jackhammer a new system into the floor and it leaks, what happens?” I asked the plumbers. “We jackhammer it again,” they said.

“If you run pipes through the attic and one of your workmen puts his foot through the ceiling, will you pay for it?” I asked the plumbers. “No,” they said.

“If you snake pipes through the walls, will you restore the walls, molding and paint to their original condition?” I asked the plumbers. “Are you serious?” they said.

That left one option: mounting pipes under the eaves and over exterior walls to various intake points.

“I don’t want pipes crawling all over our house,” I told Stef. “It’ll look ugly!”

“Let’s ask Andrew,” she replied.

Andrew, plumbing foreman at Kailua-based A-1 Budget Plumbing, was waiting for us outside.

He had already located the line serving a renovated wing of our house.

This was important because while we knew the intake system ran through the original foundation, no one knew how it reached the renovated wings.

Andrew pointed to the asphalt beneath his feet. “It runs under the driveway to feed the renovation slab,” he said.

This was good and bad news. Good because the mysteries of our plumbing system were finally being solved. Bad because it now looked like we might have to tear up the driveway.

“Can’t we just treat the pipes with those plastic liners I see in all the ads?” I asked.

Andrew explained that liners are used for large waste pipes, not half-inch-diameter intake pipes like ours.

“Actually, these driveway pipes are OK,” he said. He led us to some pipes nearby that he had unearthed.

We saw the crumbling, corroded steel that delivered water to the house when it was built in 1956.

Alongside were two shiny copper pipes that were installed when the house was renovated in the mid-’60s — nearly as old as the galvanized relic, but good as new.

We looked at each other.

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” Stef asked me.

Andrew broke in. “You were talking about using copper for this replacement,” he said. “If you mount copper pipe under the eaves of your house, it will cover the entire perimeter. You won’t need to install pipes in your floor or attic. You’ll save a tremendous amount of time and money.”

“Can you give us an estimate?” I asked him.

Andrew left and returned a few minutes later with his iPad. The numbers were impressive.

“But it’ll look ugly,” I sighed.

With deep misgivings, I signed the contract. A-1 Budget arrived the next week with a truckload of copper pipe and completed the replacement in four days — without jackhammers, busted ceilings or splintered walls.

We didn’t frame A-1 Budget’s bill when it arrived, but I did kiss it. Repeatedly. It was far lower than the other bids and much lower than we expected.

And the “ugly” new copper pipes under the eaves? They look like a jeweler’s handiwork. It will be hard to find a bracelet or necklace that is sleeker, more lustrous or pleasing to the eye.

Best of all, two years later in January 2026, our new copper pipes work perfectly. With a projected 50-year service life, we expect they will prove to be “the industry’s gold standard,” just as Andrew — and his competitors — said.

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This story appears in the January/February 2026 print issue of Ku‘u Home magazine.