Our story
One van, two daughters and 38 years of house calls
Kowalczyk & Daughters has been fixing pipes, furnaces and air conditioners in Central Ohio since 1987. Here's how a one-man plumbing business got its name before the daughters could hold a wrench.
1987: Stan and the white van
Stan Kowalczyk grew up on the south side of Columbus, the son of a steelworker and a seamstress whose parents had come over from Poland. He started sweeping floors at a plumbing supply house at sixteen, apprenticed with a crusty old master plumber named Walt who taught him that "a joint you have to come back to is a joint you didn't make," and earned his own master plumber license at twenty-nine.
In the spring of 1987 he bought a secondhand white van with 112,000 miles on it, bolted shelving into the back himself, and painted the name on the doors with a stencil kit from the hardware store: Kowalczyk & Daughters Plumbing. At the time, his daughters were nine and six.
People asked. Plenty of people asked. "What daughters?" was the question Stan heard most that first year, usually from a customer squinting at the van in their driveway. His answer never changed: "They're coming. Give 'em time." His wife, Helen, kept the books at the kitchen table in their Hilliard ranch house, and the business phone was the house phone. If you called K&D in 1988, there's a fair chance a second-grader answered.
Stan's patience was legendary. He'd explain the same shut-off valve to the same customer three years running, and he once spent an afternoon helping an elderly Polish-speaking widow in Grandview fill out her own warranty card, working through it with a pocket dictionary and a lot of pointing. He charged her for the faucet and nothing for the afternoon.
Growing up, growing out
- 1987
Stan opens for business out of his garage in Hilliard with one van and one phone line.
- 1991
First employee: a journeyman plumber named Ray, who stayed 24 years. A second van, this one with real lettering.
- 1996
K&D adds water heater replacement as a same-day service, which turns out to be the most popular thing we've ever done.
- 2003
We move out of the garage (Helen was very glad) into the shop on Wren Hollow Industrial Parkway, where we still are today.
- 2004
Agnes earns her master plumber license, the second one in the family.
- 2008
Dana comes home from the Air Force and talks her father into adding heating and cooling. "Plumbing, Heating & Cooling" goes on the trucks.
- 2012
The 24/7 emergency line goes live, answered by a real person, not a service.
- 2016
Stan hands the keys to Agnes and Dana. The name on the doors finally makes sense to everyone.
- 2019
The apprenticeship program starts with two apprentices. Gus the basset hound arrives the same year and claims the front office.
- 2025
34 people, 19 trucks, and the same phone number Stan had in 1991.
The daughters take over
Agnes was the one who rode along. From the time she was twelve she spent summers in the passenger seat of the van, handing her dad fittings and learning the difference between a slip joint and a compression nut. She started her apprenticeship right out of high school, earned her journeyman card, then her master plumber license in 2004. Customers who met her on calls in those years tell a version of the same story: they assumed she was the helper, until she started talking.
Dana went the other way first. She enlisted in the Air Force at eighteen and spent eight years as an HVAC technician, keeping heating and cooling running on bases from Texas to Germany, where "the building is too hot" can mean a hangar full of electronics. When she came home to Ohio in 2008 she looked at her father's growing customer list, noticed how many of them called a different company for their furnace, and made her case at Sunday dinner. It took two Sundays.
By the time Stan turned sixty-five, the daughters were running the place day to day anyway. In January 2016 he made it official: Agnes became president and runs the plumbing side, and Dana became vice president over heating and cooling. Stan kept a desk, a coffee mug, and Saturday mornings on the phone. He says semi-retirement suits him. The office says he's in the shop four days a week.
Dad never once told us we'd be running this someday. He just painted it on the van and waited. That's the most Stan thing he ever did.
— Agnes Kowalczyk-Reyes, President
How we still do things
The company is bigger than Stan ever planned, but most of the rules are his.
- Price first, work second. You'll know what the job costs before we start it. That's been true since the stencil-lettered van.
- Fix it, don't sell it. If your twelve-year-old furnace needs a $200 part, we'll fix the furnace. We'll tell you when replacement makes more sense, and why, and then we'll let you decide.
- Leave it cleaner. Shoe covers on, drop cloths down, and the work area swept before we go.
- Answer the phone. A real person picks up at (614) 555-0187, day or night. Usually it's Marisol. On Saturdays, sometimes it's Stan.
- Come back if it's wrong. That's the K&D Promise, and it's in writing.
And then there's Gus
Gus is a basset hound who came to us in 2019 from a rescue in Madison County, where he had been surrendered for "excessive howling." He has not stopped. He howls at the trucks when they leave in the morning, howls again when they come back, and saves a special low note for the UPS driver.
Gus's official title is Director of Morale. His duties include lying across the doorway of the front office, accepting biscuits from technicians, and supervising the parts room from a dog bed that Riley built out of an old water heater pan and a pillow. He does not go on service calls, but he does have his own page in the employee handbook, mostly about not feeding him beef jerky.
If you stop by the shop to pick up a part or drop off a check, say hello. He'll say it back, loudly.
In the neighborhood
We live here too. Agnes has coached girls' softball in Hilliard for eleven seasons, and K&D sponsors two teams every spring. Each November our crew does free furnace safety checks for a handful of seniors and veterans referred by local churches and community groups, and every year we run a winter coat drive out of the shop lobby. Our apprentices come from the high schools and career centers right around here, and a good number of them are still with us years later.
Come see for yourself
Since 1987 the idea has been simple: show up when we say we will, tell you the price, do it right, and stand behind it. Thirty-eight years later we're still at it.