Welcome to Homeownership. Here's the Service We Wish We Had.

Owning a house should feel satisfying. Most days, it feels like a second job.

If you bought your first home in the last year or two and you're nodding right now, you're not alone.

You're not imagining it

A Thumbtack survey of new American homeowners found that 83% of recent first-time buyers were surprised by how complex their homes turned out to be. The same group expects to spend about $30,000 in their first year on repairs, maintenance, and improvements. Median U.S. household income is roughly $74,500. The math is rough.

When we sat down with homeowners to figure out what was going wrong, the same patterns kept coming up. Two contractors would quote the same ceiling job at $8,000 and $20,000, and there was no way to know who was honest. A pro would say "we'll start next week," and five weeks would go by without a phone call. Someone would move into a house and not realize there was a furnace filter that needed changing until six years later. People weren't dumb. The system was opaque.

I had a guy. His name is Garrett.

Here's what I had going for me when I bought my first place: a friend named Garrett.

Garrett and I went to high school together. He's a certified contractor now, a part-time bow hunter who disappears for weeks at a time on the Appalachian Trail, and he tells it to you straight. When my basement was leaking and I had spent two years googling sump pumps and French drains and waterproofing membranes at 2 a.m., Garrett came over, looked at it, and told me what was actually happening. When the knob-and-tube electrical in the walls needed to come out so we could run fiber and an EV charger, Garrett knew a guy. Insulation. Heat pumps. The fence that blew down in a windstorm and turned into an insurance fight. Garrett, every time.

That's not just useful. It's the entire difference between feeling like a homeowner and feeling like a person paying a mortgage on a house full of problems.

Not everyone has a Garrett

Most people don't.

Most people, when something goes wrong with their house, are calling around to whoever the algorithm coughs up. They're getting three quotes that are wildly different and have no way to tell which is fair. They're being pushed toward a $20,000 job because the contractor needs the work, not because that's what they need. They're trying to coordinate a plumber, an electrician, and a carpenter who don't talk to each other, while also holding down a job and a life.

The kind of help my high school buddy gave me for free, just because we were friends, used to be available in two situations: families with someone in the trades, or people wealthy enough to hire a private property manager. Everyone else got the algorithm. That's an access problem. And it's the access problem we built ZenHome to solve.

So we built one

ZenHome is a Garrett for every homeowner.

You text us. You call us. You snap a photo of whatever's confusing you and send it. Someone answers. If you have a real problem, we get a vetted local pro to your door fast. We give you a number before work starts, not after. And the number doesn't move once you've agreed to it.

For any project, you get three honest paths. You can do it yourself, and we send you the parts list and the step-by-step. You can hire one of our pros and we handle the back and forth, the scheduling, and the payment. Or you can decide not now, and we tell you what it'll cost to wait. We don't care which path you pick. We just care that you have one.

Every job we put a pro on is backed by ZenHome and our partner pros with a minimum one-year workmanship guarantee. In writing, not as a marketing line. If something isn't right, we come back. That's the contractual term.

What ZenHome isn't

A couple of things ZenHome is not.

We don't show up in a van. We're not going to plunge your toilet. The work itself gets done by the same kinds of people Garrett would have called: local pros who already do this for a living, who we've vetted, and who actually want long-term relationships with homeowners instead of one-off tire-kicker jobs. Here's how that's different from a marketplace.

We're also not trying to disrupt the construction industry. Most of the contractors I've met don't need disrupting. They need better customers, less paperwork, and less time on the phone with people who aren't actually going to buy. ZenHome is on the same side of the trade as the people doing the work.

What we do is the part in the middle. The playbook. The right person. The right price. The follow-through. You get back to literally anything else.

How to start

If you just got the keys and you're staring at a list and you don't know where to begin, text or call 401-407-5678. Tell us what's on your mind. There's no commitment. We'll figure out together whether ZenHome is right for your house.

We're currently working with homeowners across Rhode Island and Greater Boston. If you're in either of those, we can probably help today.

Welcome to homeownership. We've been waiting for you.