Fancy Finish Carpentry

Fancy Finish Carpentry is a Massachusetts carpentry and drywall-repair shop that's stayed in one family for 52 years — started by the current owner's grandfather in 1974 and now run three generations later. Its listings place it on the North Shore: Angi gives a Newburyport street address, while its Thumbtack profile is tied to Haverhill, a few towns over. The work people hire them for today skews toward drywall — patched ceilings, textured walls, the occasional stubborn water stain — alongside deck and porch repairs and finish carpentry like custom cabinets, trim, and wood stair work. Recent word of mouth is strong and consistent. On Thumbtack, all 30 reviews posted in 2026 average 5.0 stars, and the same details keep repeating: on-time arrivals, clean job sites, and prices customers call reasonable to unbeatable. In an August 2026 review, a customer described a ceiling water stain that reappeared after the first coat; the crew came back and kept at it until the stain was fully gone — the kind of follow-through echoed in several of this year's reviews. That's a sharp turn from Angi, where the shop sits at 2.8 out of 5 — but every one of those ten reviews dates to 2005–2007. Two are real complaints from that period: in a November 2007 review, a customer wrote that a contractor removed bathroom tiles, couldn't get replacements, and missed two scheduled work nights; an October 2007 review said a job was never finished and the payment was never returned. The same stretch also produced praise — a same-day estimate, a next-day start, work called professional and excellent. Nothing explains the roughly 19-year gap in written reviews between the Angi complaints and the current Thumbtack activity. Worth asking before booking: confirm the exact business address and who's running jobs today, given the older no-show and unfinished-work complaints on file. For a routine drywall patch or deck repair, this year's reviews are reassuring; for a larger carpentry project, it's worth asking for references from the last year specifically.