Plumbing for Englewood's early 1900s homes in Salem 97301

Englewood grew up in the decades after 1900, when Salem was spreading north and east from its historic core. Many homes here date from the 1910s to the 1940s: bungalows, Craftsman cottages and modest two-story houses on lots shaded by trees that are now nearly as old as the houses. Englewood Park sits in the middle of it all, and the blocks around it have a settled, lived-in feel.

That age shows up in the plumbing. A house that has had a new kitchen and a new bathroom may still drain through the same cast-iron pipe and clay lateral it was built with. When an Englewood owner calls us, it is often because something old finally gave way: a stack that weeps at a hub, a sewer line that backs up every winter, or a smell nobody can place.

Clay laterals and cast iron in Englewood's older blocks

The sewer lateral that runs from an Englewood house to the main in the street is very often vitrified clay, laid in short lengths with a joint every few feet. Over eighty or ninety years those joints shift, and the roots of nearby maples and oaks slip into the gaps. A camera run shows where roots have entered, where a section has dropped, and whether any joint has broken open.

Under the house, the drains are usually cast iron. Water and sewer gas slowly corrode the inside, and the horizontal runs in the crawlspace wear thinnest along the bottom, where water always sits. Supply lines from the same years were often galvanized steel, and the main shutoff is frequently an old gate valve that has not been turned in decades.