John R Perry

158 building permits, and not one customer has written a word. John R Perry works out of Bessom Street in Marblehead, and what the municipal records show is a contractor who takes on structure, not surfaces. A 2023 Milton permit covers a $225,000 second-storey and garage addition with the first-floor kitchen and bathroom renovated underneath it; three years earlier another Milton job added a second floor to an existing ranch for $232,000. A 2020 East Boston permit covers a $350,000 complete interior and exterior rehab of a three-unit dwelling. Smaller work fills in around those — a $67,000 kitchen-and-bathroom remodel with new cabinets in Methuen in 2024, a 12-by-16 three-season room built onto an existing deck in Plymouth in 2021, and a bathroom floor lifted in Arlington in 2023 to chase a leak. He works commercially too: a $237,485 interior renovation of a CVS pharmacy on Massachusetts Avenue in Boston in 2019, and an x-ray room fit-out in Malden in 2022. Two caveats before anyone reads too much into that permit count. Seven of the filings are the same $7,500 cantilever-deck replacement at one Methuen address, refiled across four days in April 2024. And several electrical permits — an EcoFlow battery panel and sub-feeder in Upton, recessed lights and a relocated chandelier in Boxborough — sit under the same name, which is not work a construction supervisor normally pulls a permit for himself. The licensing needs a phone call. BuildZoom lists construction supervisor licence CS-065399 and home improvement contractor registration 178554 as active, then adds a second registration, 180636, which its own licence box marks inactive and cancelled while its advice paragraph lumps all three together as active. Ask which registration he currently trades under, and confirm it with the Office of Consumer Affairs and Business Regulation. A sensible call for an addition, a gut renovation or a kitchen-and-bath job around the North Shore and Greater Boston. With nothing written by past customers anywhere, ask for three recent job addresses and speak to those owners before you commit.