Water Damage Services
Fire Damage Services
Storm Damage Services
Restoration Built on Expertise
Precision. Craftsmanship. Reliability.
Committed to helping families and businesses recover after property damage, BuildBak® deploys a team of construction restoration professionals and skilled tradespersons to get your space back to normal as efficiently as possible. BuildBak is dedicated to delivering exceptional results while prioritizing your satisfaction.
The BuildBak Mission
Restoring Homes, Rebuilding Lives
Provide families, business owners, and organizations across the nation high-quality construction-centric restoration exclusively focused on insurance rebuilds leveraging licensed and experienced construction professionals who make customer satisfaction the priority.
- Exceed expectations
- Be involved in the community
- Treat customers as we’d treat our family
- Address problems quickly + transparently
- Take responsibility for mistakes
- Be solution-oriented
Our Mission & Values
Provide families, business owners, and organizations across the nation high quality construction-centric restoration exclusively focused on insurance rebuilds leveraging licensed and experienced construction professionals who make customer satisfaction the priority.
Exceed expectations
Be involved in the community
Treat customers as we’d treat our family
Address problems quickly + transparently
Take responsibility for mistakes
Be solution orientated
The BuildBak Story
Rebuilding Dreams Since 2006
BuildBak was founded on the belief that construction restoration services should be handled with expert oversight, precision, and care. Co-founders and brothers Nate and Matt Hamel saw an opportunity to redefine industry standards, ensuring that property owners receive expert reconstruction services while navigating insurance claims with confidence.
From a small painting company to a recognized name in reconstruction services, BuildBak has grown by prioritizing quality, integrity, and craftsmanship. Nate and his brother Matt handled every project themselves in the early years, learning firsthand what it takes to deliver exceptional results.
Our Legacy
BuildBak® started as a painting company back in 2006 and quickly evolved into The Hamel Company, which began offering property damage reconstruction services in 2007. The Hamel brothers are proud of the legacy of The Hamel Company in the community, started by their grandfather Louis H. Hamel.
Louis H. Hamel, Jr.
Louis H. Hamel, born in August 1898, was the second of the six children of Anthony Joseph Hamel and Agnes Marie Comeau. Born into dire poverty, both Louis and his older brother, Arthur (born a year earlier) had to leave school to go to work in 1909 selling candy and newspapers to support their mother and siblings when their parents split up.
Later, Louis was working as a cutter at Harmann Shoe Company, a very small and sickly (90 lbs.) boy, when a physician told him, in 1916, that he must stop working.He told the foreman he had to quit work, asking for a handful of the scraps leather-cutters left, and the price, and within an hour Louie Hamel had taken an order for a quantity of scraps at about 150% of the price the foreman had named. Customers thought he was a small child (he was actually 18) and pitied him. He earned $25,000 his first year as the L. H. Hamel Leather Company.
The Sales Chart (always “up” and through the Great Depression) starts in 1916 with the attic of a house in the Bradford District of Haverhill which was his first place of business. Next was a small industrial building in Haverhill’s industrial district not far from Railroad Square.
In about 4 years he saw his role as a middle-man coming to an end. He hired an alcoholic man who could tan leather and, from a hiding place, observed him mixing the chemicals and applying them, studied more and more and boldly decided that 2 of the conventional steps could be omitted, thereby inventing what he called “Nu Process Kidskin,” sold at a price lower than the competition.
His loan from the First National Bank of Boston was called in because the bank could not believe he was earning the profits he was reporting, at his prices. Soon Merchants Bank (later to become New England Merchants Bank) replaced the loan around 1920 and about 20 years later elected him to the Bank’s Board of Directors.
L. H. Hamel Leather Company was the world’s largest tanner of kidskins (now no longer tanned in the USA) and had an affiliate, Hamel Realty Company, which owned most of the multi-tenanted industrial buildings in Haverhill, starting with the “Tilton Building” on Essex Street whose basement was the “Wet Department,” including the “Beamhose” which was too small. Rather than be a vulnerable tenant, he bought the two adjacent buildings, the “Burgess” and “Lang” buildings and thus became the Landlord to other tenants.
Many of the Hamel Realty properties had been derelict old industrial buildings which he restored to use and whose windows he painted a uniform bright yellow, installing a uniform set of black building directories with gold lettering and removing all other signs, improving the industrial district of Haverhill. To three of those buildings he attracted Western Electric (while building its new facility in North Andover) on a 15 year lease, filling about 300,000 square feet of space with excellent jobs.
Not too long after he “stopped working” and went into business in 1916, Louie Hamel became a mobile young successful man with a Model A Ford in which (with his friend Harold A. Lawson) he traveled far up to Freemont New Hampshire where, at a Grange dance (The National Grange of the Order of Patrons of Husbandry) Louie met Dorothy (“Dottie”) A. Berry of Raymond NH, a fresh-air farmer’s daughter and lover of all of nature (people, animals, plants, rocks and earth).
The first of their 7 children, born March 25, 1924, was Virginia Dorothy Hamel who is shown wearing nothing-but-the-best in baby outfits in her mother’s fashionable arms, in the attached photo. The proud father, now a “family man” to make restitution for his own childhood trouble, looking healthy and dressed more for Manhattan than for the Berry farm, shows off the flag of fatherhood and success in the form of a baby diaper on the laundry line at that farm (which also came to be the location of “Lakeview Inn, E. Berry Prop”).
A Commitment to Quality
“Insurance claims aren’t seasonal. Disasters happen, and people need help dealing with the aftermath, no matter what is happening with the economy,” Nate explained. “The vast majority of companies working in the restoration industry aren’t construction-centric. They treat construction as an afterthought, which made it incredibly easy to establish a foothold.”
BuildBak Roots
Continuing the Legacy
The foundation of BuildBak’s construction restoration services is built on generations of craftsmanship and integrity. Long before Nate and Matt Hamel launched BuildBak, their grandfather’s business instilled a deep commitment to quality and trust.
Nate and his brother Matt carried that legacy forward, expanding their expertise from leather tannery to reconstruction services. Today, BuildBak upholds those same values, ensuring every home and business it restores meets the highest standards.
By blending decades of experience with a client-focused approach, BuildBak isn’t just rebuilding properties—it’s restoring lives.
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We transform your experience with property damage by providing extraordinary customer service, timely repairs, and high-quality work.