What this is

This site exists because finding a decent contractor in New England is harder than it should be, and because almost nobody covering this region writes anything useful about the houses that are actually here.

There are roughly 2.6 million housing units across Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Connecticut, and a very large share of them were built before 1940. Triple deckers in Worcester and Providence. Center chimney colonials in the Quiet Corner. Capes on the Cape. Mill worker housing through the Blackstone Valley. Shingled cottages on the shore that were never meant to be lived in through February. Each of those is a different job with different problems, and generic national advice does not help you with any of them.

So we do two things. We publish specific, useful information about what work costs in this market and what goes wrong on these particular kinds of houses. And we connect homeowners with contractors who work in their town.

Being direct about the model: this is a referral service. We are not a contractor. We do not employ trades, we do not hold contractor licenses, and we never touch your house. The contractors we refer you to are independent businesses, licensed and insured in the states where they operate, and we check that before we send anyone your way. If a contractor works out, we may be paid a referral fee by them. You are never charged anything.

One useful side effect of that arrangement: we have no product line to defend. We can tell you when vinyl is the right answer instead of fiber cement, when a repair beats a replacement, and when a project is not worth doing this year. A contractor who needs to sell the job cannot really say any of that.