Stephen A Modica

Stephen Modica has been building and rebuilding porches out of Swampscott since 1988 — a two-person sole proprietorship where the owner's name is the company name. His Massachusetts home improvement contractor registration, #173271, is active and held in his own name, and his BBB page has carried an A+ with accreditation since 2012. Porches and decks are the through-line. HomeAdvisor's service list for him is deck-and-porch work, and the jobs customers describe back it up: in a November 2024 review, a homeowner with failing front porches on a two-family said the project started as a full remove-and-rebuild until Steve and his crew decided a total removal wasn't necessary — they reset the old footings, cut the number of windows, swapped in sliders, restained the interior wood to match the ceilings, and weatherproofed the outside. A 2020 customer told a similar story about a leaking bulkhead: he looked at it, said it could be repaired instead of replaced, and repaired it. Bathrooms come up nearly as often, and reviewers in 2014 and 2017 gave him credit for wrangling the electricians, plumbers and inspectors himself. The other half of the picture is finishing. A November 2020 porch job drew a 0.5-star complaint on HomeAdvisor and a matching one-line complaint on BuildZoom — an unsupervised crew, and mistakes to railings, balusters and boxes the homeowner was still redoing three months later. It isn't isolated. A 2016 customer said touch-up work had to be pointed out and that projects ran long, with everything "90% completed, something was always left undone." A 2013 bathroom remodel went further sideways: both bathrooms torn apart at once, no plastic hung against the dust, and the electrician and plumber walking off the job. Across 26 reviews from 2011 to 2024 the balance still lands positive — HomeAdvisor averages 4.4 over 24 ratings, BuildZoom 3.0 over just two. BuildZoom also lists 33 permitted projects across Greater Boston and the North Shore, which fits a shop that has kept working steadily for decades. What it doesn't have is a fresh paper trail: the newest customer account is from November 2024. He's the right call for porch, deck and bathroom work where you want one long-established carpenter rather than a crew whose owner you'll never meet. Before booking, ask who is actually on site day to day, get the punch list written down, and agree in writing what counts as done — that is the thing his critical reviewers, across three different years, all circled.