McGonagle Home Improvement

The clearest picture of McGonagle Home Improvement comes from town halls rather than review sites: 13 permitted projects on file, four of them in the last three years, and one job keeps repeating — finishing basements. Framing, drywall, floors, trim, sometimes a full bath or an office worked in, at valuations running from a few thousand dollars up to about $72,000. Matthew McGonagle owns the company, which works out of Montclair Road in Haverhill, and its permits fan out to Merrimac, Groveland, Methuen, Lowell and Westford. Kitchens, baths, re-roofs and decks turn up in that history too, so this reads as a general remodeling outfit rather than a single-trade shop; on Houzz it calls itself a full service home improvement company. Two things are worth sorting out before you call. Neither BuildZoom nor Houzz carries a single customer review, so there is no homeowner account of how the crew communicates or finishes — ask for addresses of recent basements and go look at them. And BuildZoom lists four Massachusetts home improvement contractor registrations under the name, two of them active (#200927 and #176721) and two earlier ones cancelled, so ask which registration is current and confirm the number yourself with the Office of Consumer Affairs. A sensible call if you want a basement finished by someone who has done a lot of them within a few towns of you. Just expect to do the reference-checking yourself, because the review pages do none of it for you.