North Star Masonry

Armando Lopez is on site every day his crew is, and homeowners keep saying so. Across 23 Google ratings averaging 4.8, his first name shows up in nearly every account — a mason people hire for the hard, visible things at the front of a house: brick steps, flagstone walkways, chimneys, stone walls. The write-ups are unusually specific. One homeowner, in June 2025, had the crew spend two weeks redoing front and side walkways, steps and a back patio, then had them repoint a chimney and fix a foundation leak on the same visit. Another, writing in June 2022, described a stone wall built to 3 feet by 28 feet to replace a dying chain-link fence, with the sidewalk swept clean at the end of every day because the city owns it and the traffic is heavy. A May 2024 customer expanding a patio wrote that the crew re-graded the old surface, blended slightly different-colored new stone into the old, re-trenched a downspout and cleaned up someone else's concrete work — and still held the original quote. That last part recurs. Reviewers in 2022, 2024 and 2025 all describe an estimate given plainly up front and then honored, and several mention repair being offered where a full replacement was possible: a June 2025 customer specifically thanked him for agreeing to repair one set of brick stairs rather than tear them out. Two things to sort out before signing. The tenure claim doesn't line up: Thumbtack, Angi and Porch all print 17 years in business, while the BBB file records North Star Masonry, Inc. as started and incorporated on 4/22/2019 — about seven years. Armando may well have been laying stone far longer than the corporation has existed, but ask him which is which. And there is no license or registration number anywhere in what any of these sites publish; Angi's own note says its licence and insurance statements are self-reported and unverified. Massachusetts requires home improvement contractor registration for masonry and hardscape work — patios, walls, steps and chimneys are not among the exempt trades — so ask for his registration number and check it with the Office of Consumer Affairs. Also worth knowing: BBB carries the company but has issued no grade at all, saying it lacks sufficient information, and Porch's 4.5 from 17 is its own restatement of ratings collected elsewhere, not a separate body of customers. For a set of brick stairs, a flagstone walk, a patio or a stone wall on the North Shore, this is a small crew with a consistent story across five years and a lot of named, checkable projects behind it. Confirm the registration and the tenure, and get the quote in writing — by every account, he keeps to it.