O'Connell Carpentry

In February 2026, in an r/ArlingtonMA thread started by someone planning a two-storey addition, a neighbour wrote that they had used O'Connell Carpentry out of Belmont for a couple of projects, would keep using them, and "can't recommend Pat and his team enough". Repeat business, from someone who names the owner, is the useful thing in a thread full of guesses. Pat O'Connell has run the business as a sole proprietorship since January 2003 — 23 years, two employees, filed with the Better Business Bureau at Harrington Street in Watertown and listing Belmont as its base. BBB grades it A+, though the business has not sought accreditation. The work reaches further than the name suggests. Kitchen and bathroom remodels, additions and extensions, finished basements, decks and porches sit alongside the carpentry proper — stairs, trim, wainscoting, custom bookcases — plus exterior work like windows and siding. The Houzz portfolio shows five project sets: kitchens in Weston, bathrooms in Cambridge, decks in Waltham. Coverage runs across Newton, Waltham, Brookline, Arlington, Lexington, Watertown, Belmont, Winchester and Weston. What is thin is written customer history: neither Houzz nor BBB carries a single review, so that one Reddit recommendation is doing all the work. For a two-person shop running on word of mouth in these towns that is ordinary enough, but it means asking for two or three recent local references and going to look at a finished job before you sign anything.