1st Squad Custom Painting

1st Squad Custom Painting is a Harwich outfit built around Leo — reviewers name him directly, job after job — offering interior, exterior, and a standout line in kitchen-cabinet refinishing across Cape Cod's residential and some commercial work. The company's site says it has been running about a decade with 500+ projects and 15+ crew members; the Massachusetts registry independently shows the company's home improvement contractor license active. Cabinet work comes up again and again as the thing 1st Squad is known for. Reviews from 2023 through 2025 describe a genuine multi-step refinishing process — old finish stripped, multiple coats of primer, sanding between coats to fill grain, and a hard lacquered top coat — with one customer in November 2023 saying the result looked like factory-grade new cabinets, and another in June 2024 describing drawer facings pulled and sprayed off-site while the frames were painted in place after careful prep. On house exteriors, the recurring story is thoroughness before the paint goes on. A June 2025 review described a crew that scraped and sanded old paint, repaired rotted wood, sealed boards, washed weathered shingles back to a silvery shade, and protected the foundation shrubs — all despite spring rains slowing the job. An August 2021 review said trim overdue for painting for years came out looking as good as when the house was built. More than one review mentions Leo doing extra repair work outside the original contract at no additional charge. The one real blemish in the record is an August 2025 review: a customer who'd trusted 1st Squad with an entire interior finish after a smaller furniture job said Leo asked to be paid before the work was fully done, the crew then put too much paint on a basement floor so it never cured properly, and Leo stopped returning calls afterward — the customer ended up hiring someone else to fix the floor. It's the lone substantive complaint in an otherwise active, glowing review history: Google shows 4.9 stars across 29 ratings, with new five-star reviews landing within the last two months. Before booking a larger job, worth asking directly how payment is staged and locking in the schedule for that final step in writing.