Maine Home+Design, July 2011

How does a young builder from away break into the well-established, tight-knit local building community? Kevin Lord will tell you.

Growing up in Chicopee, Massachusetts, Kevin Lord was always lucky. In fact, he earned a reputation for it. On every high school snow day, he and his friends met up to play nickel poker—with predictable results. “Whenever there was money involved, I always won,” Lord says today, as if he still can’t believe it himself. “My friends would razz me. But I won every card game we had and every raffle I entered.”

Maine Home+Design, May 2008

It was a storm of epic proportions. For three tidal cycles, the waves pounded Gooch’s Beach in Kennebunk, breaching and eventually destroying the seawall, lifting boulders onto the road and into the yards of the houses along Beach Avenue. Homes were flooded, roads were impassible, seaweed and beach detritus littered lawns and porches. Now known as the Patriot’s Day storm, it was a Nor’easter that drove up the eastern seaboard in April 2007 and hit the Maine coast with a terrifying ferocity not seen since 1991. In the aftermath, residents struggled to deal with extensive damage from waves, wind, and rain.