The Work We Do: George Fredricks, Hardy Plumbing
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My name’s George Fredricks. I’m the manager of Hardy Plumbing on the North Fork out in Mattituck. I also manage all of New Construction on the North and South forks.
We do all types of plumbing, all phases of plumbing, [from] a little cottage, one-bathroom renovation on the North Fork to a 14-bathroom renovation on the ocean in Southampton. We replace faucets, we replace sinks, we replace hot water heaters, boilers, heating systems and homes.
I’ve been in the industry for over 30 years. I went to BOCES for plumbing when I was in school and later on, while I was a police officer, I went to … BOCES training, for plumbing also.
Thirty years ago I started at Hardy Plumbing before I was a police officer. I had four years’ training approximately there, where I learned to be a plumber and eventually got my plumbing license. I started Southold Plumbing and Heating, originally. Then Petro, which owns Hardy Plumbing & Heating, bought my company and they took me into Mattituck here and expanded my role from service on the North Fork to all of New Construction.
The North Fork is really great to work on because we have a lot of friends out here, everybody knows everybody. So if you do a good job, it carries on, as long as your reputation is good. And we know a lot of people here and it’s a good place to work.
We’re also renovating our front shop. We’ve been out of it for a few years and we’ve done some nice renovations to it. We’ll be moving our shops there in the next two to three weeks, we’ll have road frontage so people can come in right off the road and not have to pull in the back.
I love this job, every aspect of it I love. I love to go on the job sites, I like to talk to the builders, I like to talk to the customers … but I also like, you know, managing my men. We have a great group of guys that are willing to do pretty much anything, and we get the job done all the time — and we get it done the right way.
“The Work We Do” is a Suffolk Times multimedia project profiling workers on the North Fork.
