When the floor's worth more than the pipe, where you cut matters.
A slab leak in a home like yours is a collision between a mundane failure and an extraordinary setting. The failure itself is ordinary, vintage copper under concrete, minerals, time, a pinhole. The setting is everything above it, the floors, the finishes, the rooms assembled to a standard that a jackhammer has no place in. Which is why the response here starts from a fixed principle. The fix must match the home, and the modern fixes can.
Detection is absolute first, and absolutely non destructive. The equipment locates the leak through the slab within inches, mapping before anyone proposes anything, because in a property like this, precision isn't preference, it's protection. Then the paths, weighed against the home itself. A single surgical access at the marked spot, when the evidence says that's cleanest. Or the reroute, and in La Jolla's finished homes the reroute is often the star, the failed line abandoned in place, its replacement run overhead through walls and ceiling cavities, the slab never touched, the floors never lifted, the fix complete and invisible.
The conversation honors the stakes. Every option explained in plain English with its true tradeoffs, the honest read on what one leak means versus a pattern, the repipe conversation when vintage pipe has genuinely reached that chapter, and no pressure anywhere in it. You decide, informed and unhurried, with a licensed contractor performing the work when you're ready. Extraordinary homes deserve fixes that leave no trace. Here, that's the entire design.
"One precise opening beats a treasure hunt through stone."
