Shower repair in Fort Belvoir.

Cook Inlet is 256 homes, 148 detached and 108 townhouses, and the county’s records date almost all of them to 2002, 2003 and 2004. Every shower in the neighborhood is somewhere past twenty years old, usually a single-handle valve from one builder’s order. If your handle droops or your shower drips, ask a neighbor. The same cartridge is probably tiring on the next street too.

That works in your favor. On a valve this age the fix is mostly a cartridge, which comes out the front and costs $250 to $450. Each home there has a full basement, so the plumbing below the bath is often within reach if the trim is ever the problem.

Backlick Road, by Accotink Creek, is a different set of houses. The county has 14 detached homes on it, with records from 1900 to 2010, mostly 1925 and 1978. A 1925 house may have had its bath added decades later, with a two-handle valve whose stems wear before the rest of the shower does.

On the post, family housing belongs to The Villages at Belvoir. A loose handle or a drip there goes in as a service request to them, and they run 24-hour emergency maintenance. We work on homes off the post, and we’d rather say so than take a call we can’t help with.