Figueiredo Carpenter & Custom Builder

A house built in 1799 is the job that tells you most about Figueiredo Carpenter & Custom Builder. The couple who bought it in 2018 wrote, in a June 2020 review, that Tom Figueiredo assessed what a 220-year-old structure needed to last another two centuries, set up a process they called fair and affordable for work whose scope nobody can know until the walls come open, and checked with them before starting each new phase. That is the firm's whole pitch: historic restoration first, everything else after. Tom founded the business in 1987, having gone straight from vocational school into carpentry in 1980, and the company says he is on site every day working alongside the crew. The BBB lists it as a sole proprietorship with five employees and grades it A+. It says it has restored dozens of South Coast homes dating to the early 1700s, and the BBB's own description adds churches and museums to that. It runs an in-house cabinet shop, which is where the built-ins, specialised staircases and moulding profiles come from. What is thin is the written history. Two customer accounts exist anywhere: the 2020 restoration above, and a January 2019 Angi review from a homeowner who called Tom the best contractor he had worked with in 67 years and said nobody had to pay until the work was done right. Nothing has been written since. The Angi profile carries 23 project photos. One loose end worth closing before you sign: the company's own site says it is fully licensed and insured but publishes no registration number. The right call if you own an old house and want the person quoting the job to be the person swinging the hammer. Ask for references from the last couple of years — the written history stops in 2020 — and get the licence and registration numbers in writing.