PBZ Construction, Inc.

PBZ Construction's paperwork is in order in a way most small shops can't match: a Massachusetts home improvement contractor registration, #117972, verified active against the state registry in the company's own name; BBB accreditation held since October 2009 with an A+ grade; and a permit file BuildZoom scores at 113, above 97 percent of the state's licensed contractors. The company works out of Stoughton and lists Canton as its other address. Paul Zampine and Robert Ayer founded it in 1993 — both Blue Hill Regional graduates, by the company's own account — and it has stayed locally owned since. Bob Ayer is the name customers deal with. It runs kitchens, bathrooms, additions, custom and new construction, and lists backhoe and skidsteer work among its services. The permits show the range: a $7,200 deck demolition in Sharon at one end, a $668,510 rear addition in Chestnut Hill at the other, plus jobs in Brookline, Belmont and Braintree. Its listed service area runs across the South Shore and the near-south suburbs. The written word is where it thins out. Four reviews total, and only one from this decade. That 2023 one is the useful one: a homeowner sent by their bathroom designer, who had worked with Ayer for twenty years, described a gut renovation where the crew found and reinforced substructure nobody had budgeted for and still finished on time and on budget. Back in 2017, one customer wrote that Ayer returns phone calls and that his men matched a new front portico so well it blends into the house; another said the gray-and-orange kitchen on the company's homepage is theirs, a complete gut job. One thing doesn't line up. BuildZoom shows a clean 5.0 from four ratings, but Google shows 3.0 from two — and those two carry no written text, so there is nothing to say what went wrong. Worth raising directly. For a kitchen, a bathroom or an addition in the South Shore towns it covers, the credentials and permit history are about as solid as a five-person shop gets. Ask about the Google ratings, and ask for two or three customers from the last year — the most detailed praise here is from 2017, and you want to hear how the crew works now.