A small Asheville shop, doing one thing well.

Wes Carmichael started out apprenticed to a Charleston plumbing house that did mostly historic-district work — old buildings, old fixtures, the kind of plumbing where the easy answer is rarely the right one. He worked there for a decade before moving to Asheville in 2011, looking for a place where the same kind of careful residential work might find a home.

In 2014, he and his wife Hannah started Cedar & Pipe out of a single van. The first year was three jobs a week, mostly word-of-mouth referrals from a remodel contractor who'd liked Wes's rough-in work on a Montford bathroom. By the third year, they'd added a second plumber. Today, ten years in, the shop runs five plumbers and Hannah in the office — and that's the size it'll stay.

The reason isn't ambition restraint. It's that craft work has a ceiling, and pretending otherwise produces the kind of plumbing company that everyone in Asheville has a story about. We'd rather be the shop that turns down work in February because we're booked out than the shop that takes everything and disappoints half of it.

What we sell is attention. Attention to the gas line sizing before quoting a tankless. Attention to where the inspector will look first. Attention to the wax ring under the toilet that the previous plumber installed without seating it square. The work is rarely glamorous. It does, however, last.

If you have a project worth doing right, we'd like to be the people who do it.