About

As an entrepreneur from a young age, Nate Hamel started the original incarnation of BuildBak® as Hamel Painters in 2006 while still in college. After graduating from Bentley University with Honors Majoring in Economics and Finance, he began focusing on the insurance and restoration industry. Starting as a subcontractor Nate quickly realized the lack of quality contractors performing rebuilds. Partnering with his brother Matt, the company quickly became the quality reconstruction leader in the Greater Boston Market. Nate is fluent in Spanish and has spent extensive time abroad. When not working he's spending time with his wife and daughters.  

One of the hard-working owners, Matt Hamel is in charge of the company operations, which he’s grown in partnership with both large and small local restoration businesses who needed a reliable construction company to follow mitigation efforts. Matt studied international business and finance at University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business School. He then got his start in investment banking at Bank of America Merrill Lynch in 2009 in New York City. After two and a half years of intense 80-100 hour work weeks, Matt reconnected with his brother Nate to build a construction-centric restoration firm that vows to keep the customer's experience at the forefront.

We have a full-time staff who are focused on delivering the highest level of quality service and customer satisfaction. At BuildBak, we strive to be the most friendly and professional reconstruction company around.

From our office staff to the service men and women at your home, everyone is a local and focused on getting your property repaired as quickly as possible.

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").