Christopher Cowhig

Twenty-five permits and not one customer review — that is the whole written trace of Christopher Cowhig, a Lynn-based builder whose paper trail is municipal rather than conversational. The permits themselves say more than any profile blurb. They cluster around East Boston three-family houses — gut renovations, fire-damage rebuilds, a ground-up four-unit with a roof deck — with a run of Marblehead work alongside them, including a burst-pipe rebuild of three kitchens and three baths and a commercial-to-residential conversion. Typical permit value lands around $42,000, but the spread runs from a few thousand dollars to jobs in the high six figures, which is the shape of a builder who takes both small repairs and full reconstructions. BuildZoom lists him for kitchen, bathroom, basement and whole-home remodeling plus additions, and lists a Massachusetts construction supervisor registration, CS-115144, on his profile. That number comes from the directory, not from a check against the state, so confirm it yourself with the Department of Public Safety before you sign anything. His BuildZoom score of 102 is built from permit history, not from homeowners — nobody has posted a review there at all. That absence is the thing to weigh. There is no customer account here, recent or old, describing how a job actually went: no timelines, no cleanup, no pricing, no dispute. For a homeowner, that means the usual reference-checking has to happen the old way — ask for two or three addresses from the past year, ideally jobs like yours, and call them. If you have a structural project in Lynn, Marblehead or East Boston and want someone who clearly moves permits through city hall regularly, he is worth a conversation. Just go in knowing you will be doing the vetting that reviews would normally do for you.