What Is Home Care? One Team for Your Whole Home
Hawthorn Home Care is one team managing your home: proactive inspections, itemized estimates, and every request tracked to done. How the membership works.
Owning a house in Greater Boston quietly becomes a second job. The gutters need cleaning before the leaves finish falling. The furnace needs its annual service before the first cold snap. A contractor came out in June, said he'd send an estimate, and never did. None of it is hard, exactly — it's just endless, and it's all on you to remember, schedule, chase, and check.
Hawthorn Home Care exists to hand that job to someone else. It's a membership for homeowners: one team — ours — manages your home's maintenance, inspections, and repairs, the way a property manager runs a building, except the building is your house and the team is a custom home builder's. Today, 70 Greater Boston households have us do it.
Here's how it works.
One point of contact
The first change members notice is the phone book shrinking. Instead of a plumber, an HVAC company, a gutter crew, a painter, and a handyman — each with their own scheduling, billing, and definition of "we'll get to it" — there is one team, one place to reach them, and one system where everything about your home lives.
Need something? Members reach us three ways: a text, an email, or the member portal. Every request, however it arrives, becomes a tracked ticket in our system — assigned to a person, given a status, and followed until it's done. Nothing lives in someone's voicemail or gets lost in an inbox. When you ask "whatever happened with that leak?" there's an answer, because the ticket has the whole story.
Proactive inspections, not emergency calls
Most home maintenance is reactive: something breaks, and then you deal with it — usually at the worst possible time. Home Care runs the opposite way.
Twice a year, we walk your home and property on a scheduled inspection — roof edges and gutters, heating and cooling systems, exterior caulking and paint, plumbing fixtures, safety devices, the slow leaks and small failures that turn into January emergencies. (Our fall maintenance checklist is a public version of the fall round.) The walkthrough is documented as we go: findings recorded with photos and video, so what we saw is a record, not a recollection.
That's the heart of the program. Problems get found while they're still small and schedulable — on your calendar, not the weather's.
From findings to finished work: the process
Every inspection and every request runs through the same connected process:
- Walkthrough. We inspect the home and document what we find, with photos and video.
- Documented findings. You get the findings in writing — what we found, where, and why it matters.
- Itemized estimate. Our inspection platform turns those findings into an itemized estimate, so each item stands on its own line.
- You approve, item by item. Nothing is bundled into a take-it-or-leave-it number. Approve the gutter cleaning, defer the deck repair, skip the nice-to-have — your call, per line.
- Tracked in the portal. Approved items move into your member portal as tracked work, with status you can see.
- Managed through completion. We schedule, coordinate, and supervise the work — our own crew or our vetted trades — until it's done and the ticket closes.
- Ongoing requests, anytime. Between walkthroughs, anything that comes up goes the same route: text, email, or portal in; ticket tracked; work managed to done.
One home. One connected process.
What's included — and how work gets approved
Membership covers the management layer and the recurring essentials: the twice-yearly walkthroughs with documented findings, HVAC tune-ups, gutter cleaning, vent and duct cleaning, and coordination of appliance and fixture service — plus a maintenance plan for your home with budget visibility, so you can see what's coming before it arrives.
Work beyond the membership — a repair, a small project, an upgrade you've been meaning to do — always starts the same way: with that itemized estimate you approve first. No work begins on a verbal "go ahead," and nothing gets done that you didn't see and sign off on in advance.
Who runs it
Home Care is run by Hawthorn Builders — a design-build firm that has been building and renovating custom homes in Greater Boston since 2005, with a 20-person team of project managers, carpenters, and coordinators. The same people who know how houses here are put together are the ones walking yours twice a year. That's the difference between a handyman service and a builder managing your home: when we find something, we know what it is, what it takes, and how to get it fixed properly.
Who it's for
Home Care fits homeowners who'd rather own their home than operate it: busy families, people who travel or split time between homes, and anyone who has watched a "small thing" become a big invoice. If you have a house in Greater Boston and a list of things you keep meaning to get to, Home Care was built for exactly that list. Start with a conversation — or a question. Questions are always free.
