Social media for remodelers working shotgun houses and two states

A shotgun house has no hallway, so your camera walks through somebody's bedroom

The floor plan that defines the old neighborhoods here decides where the lens can point and what hour it can point there.

In a shotgun house the rooms open into each other in a line. To reach the kitchen at the back you pass through the front room and at least one bedroom, and a continuous walkthrough publishes both of them.

So film from the back door in. Most of these houses have a rear entrance off the yard or the alley that lands you at or near the kitchen, and using it as the crew route and the camera route keeps the family's rooms out of the frame entirely.

Shoot tight and hold still. A slow pan across a narrow room catches a nightstand, a prescription bottle and somebody's kids on the wall, and none of that is yours to publish.

Then check the clock against the household. Logistics and air freight work keeps whole streets in Shively and Okolona on second and third shift, which means a middle room in an occupied shotgun house has somebody asleep in it at ten in the morning. Ask at the pre-start walkthrough which rooms and which hours are closed, write it down where the crew will see it, and film on the days the house is empty.

Show what you kept, because an Old Louisville owner fears what you will throw away

In the historic neighborhoods the worry is not the new kitchen, it is whether the house survives getting one.

Victorian houses in Old Louisville and the Highlands carry trim, transoms, plaster and tall windows that cannot be bought back. The owner knows it, and a video that is nothing but demolition reads to them as a threat.

Film the saving. Trim numbered and stacked in the front room, a transom boxed before the wall moves, plaster patched rather than covered over, the original door rehung on its own hinges after the opening changed.

Baths in these houses were carved out of something else, a bedroom corner or the end of a stair hall, and the ceiling height makes an ordinary fixture layout look wrong. Show the room as you found it before you show what it became, because most of the skill was deciding where a bath could go at all.

Keep the sourcing in the frame too. Where a matching baseboard came from, what a salvage yard had that week, what a millwork shop reproduced and what it took. Owners in the Highlands and Crescent Hill trade that information constantly and almost none of it exists on video.

You cross the river once that day, so shoot the whole Indiana job in one trip

A job in Clark or Floyd County is not a place anybody is driving back to because the before footage got missed.

A crew working in Jeffersonville or New Albany crossed a bridge to get there and will cross it again to get home. Nobody is repeating that trip for a camera, which is the real reason Southern Indiana work goes unfilmed while Jefferson County work does not.

So the Indiana job gets filmed as one arc in one visit or it does not get filmed. Before demolition starts, walk the room once with the phone running and say plainly what is wrong with it. That single pass is the only before you are going to have.

Build everything else around visits the schedule already pays for. The wall opening up, the first look at the framing, the client standing in the doorway at the end of a day. If the crew is going over for one install, that is the day for the walkthrough, the close-up work and anything the owner is willing to say on camera.

Plan the volume honestly as well. A content plan that assumes an even split between Louisville Metro and Southern Indiana usually produces three months of Kentucky footage and an apology. Count the trips you actually make across the water and build the plan on that number.

Work backward from the first Saturday in May, because the deadline is a party

Few markets hand a remodeler a completion date set by the calendar rather than by the homeowner, and this one does it every year.

Plenty of households here host for Derby weekend, and the bourbon trade keeps out of town guests arriving through the rest of the year. A kitchen that is not finished by that Saturday is a real problem to the owner, not an inconvenience.

Which puts the decision in January. Content that sells a spring start has to be running in the weeks when somebody is picturing that room full of people and has not called anybody yet.

Say the schedule out loud on camera. A short video naming which start dates still finish before the first Saturday in May, and what happens to a job that starts later, does more work than any pair of before and after photographs you will publish that quarter.

Be equally plain about what you cannot take. An owner who hears in February that you are full through April will call you in July. One who finds out in April will not.

Everything here that would hold for a remodeler in any city, we put on a single page at /industries/kitchen-bath-remodeling/social-media.