Based in Dover, building across the Seacoast and southern Maine

Portsmouth, Rye, Hampton, Kittery, York and Ogunquit sit in a harsher wind and corrosion environment than a house eight miles inland, so near the water we spec stainless fasteners, high-wind nailing patterns and a rainscreen gap behind the cladding. Vinyl serves fine on a sheltered lot in Barrington or Lee; within a mile or two of open water, fiber cement or engineered wood holds up better at a higher cost, and we will tell you which side of that line your house is on.

Dover, Portsmouth and South Berwick have some of the oldest housing stock in the country, and behind those walls we routinely find balloon framing, plaster over lath, knob and tube still energized, undersized panels and soft sills. All of it is workable: we probe before quoting, and anything that genuinely cannot be known until demo goes in the contract as a written allowance or exclusion.

Roofs here get framed for town-by-town snow loads plus the drift load where a lower roof meets a taller wall, and footings and deck piers go below frost, roughly four feet, or they heave. Ice dams are a heat-loss problem, not a gutter problem: the fix is air sealing and insulation depth, with membrane at the eaves as the backup that keeps water out of your ceiling.

Permits are issued town by town, and a part-time inspector or a planning board that meets once a month can set your start date, so we build that into the schedule up front. Historic district review in Portsmouth, shoreland rules within 250 feet of tidal water and designated rivers, and septic review on bedroom additions all come up here, and knowing which applies to your lot is part of the estimate.

Kittery is minutes from Dover, but Maine has its own code adoption cycle, permit offices and trade licensing, plus sales tax on building materials that New Hampshire does not charge. The person writing the scope has to know which side of the river the house is on, and ours do.