Worthington's houses are 60 to 200 years old. Their pipes are the story.

There is no such thing as a generic Worthington plumbing call. In a city where the newest houses are older than most of Powell, the first question is always what is actually in the wall.

Colonial Hills is where that question gets most interesting. The neighborhood's 873 single-family homes were begun in the early 1940s by the Defense Homes Corporation to house wartime production workers, with another 645 lots added and construction running into the early 1950s - Cape Cods, ranches and bungalows built quickly and built to last. What went in the walls was galvanized steel supply and cast-iron drainage. Galvanized has a typical service life somewhere around 20 to 50 years, which puts these houses decades past due, and it does not fail by leaking first. It fails by closing: rust builds inward until the effective diameter of a half-inch line is a quarter inch, and the homeowner experiences that as pressure loss rather than as a pipe problem. Old Worthington, the village core around High Street and the Village Green, goes back further still, with genuinely nineteenth-century houses and a historic district that constrains what can change outside. The post-war and 1960s-70s subdivisions filling the rest are the copper-and-cast-iron generation, now at the age where cast-iron drain walls scale and crack.

Worthington's water comes from the City of Columbus at roughly seven to nine grains per gallon, and here it matters for a specific reason. In a modern house that hardness is a water-heater and fixture-cartridge issue. In a Worthington house with original galvanized, hardness compounds with corrosion: iron oxide narrows the pipe from the inside and mineral scale finishes the job. That combination is the classic Worthington low-pressure complaint, and it is why replacing a pressure regulator on one of these houses usually does not fix anything. Above all of it sits the tree canopy that makes the city what it is, with roots working into 60- and 80-year-old sewer laterals underneath.