Valera Velev

Bathrooms and basements, mostly — that is what the permit trail behind Valera Velev shows. Working from a Marblehead apartment address, he has filed for a pair of second-floor bathroom renovations in Brookline at $37,500, a Brookline basement converted into a family room with a bathroom at $48,500, a kitchen-and-bathroom remodel in Peabody at $16,000, and an attic storage room in Peabody at $8,000. Every job is interior renovation; none of it is exterior or new construction. The jobs also skew larger than the usual one-man remodel. Two of the four cleared $37,000, which is whole-room-with-plumbing territory rather than a tile-and-vanity swap. BuildZoom lists him as a sole owner-operator with no crew on file. No homeowner has written anything about him, anywhere. BuildZoom says outright it has received no reviews, so there is no rating and no account of how any of these projects went. And the score of 93 that BuildZoom puts at the top of his page is calculated from permits and licence status — it is not a customer verdict, and reading it as one would be a mistake. On credentials, BuildZoom lists two separate Massachusetts records: a home improvement contractor registration, #189012, which it says it checked as active in March 2026, and a construction supervisor licence, CS-110667, checked as active in July 2026 with the Department of Public Safety. Holding both is the normal shape for a builder who pulls his own permits, not a discrepancy. But these are the directory's claims about a holder listed under a bare personal name, and neither was confirmed against the state registry here — get the numbers from him and check them yourself at the Office of Consumer Affairs and the Department of Public Safety. The pace is slow: one permitted project in the past two years, the 2024 Brookline bathrooms. His work has ranged well outside the North Shore, into Brookline, so distance is not obviously a barrier. If you are gutting a bathroom or finishing a basement and want someone whose filed work is exactly that, he fits the profile. Just recognise you would be sourcing him on permit history alone — ask for recent client references directly, and confirm both licence numbers before any money changes hands.