Filming a roof nobody can stand on, from a street with no front yard

In Old Louisville there is no yard to put a sign in, so the feed is the sign

The oldest demand generator in roofing is a lawn sign on a street where a crew is working, and a good share of the streets in this city cannot host one.

Shotgun rows and Victorian blocks in Old Louisville, Germantown and parts of the Highlands sit close to the sidewalk with almost nothing in front. The sign has nowhere to go and the neighbors walk past it anyway.

The substitute is a post from that street on the day the crew is there, describing the block rather than the address. People who live around the corner recognize a run of houses immediately, and recognition is the whole mechanism the sign was providing.

It also does something the sign never could. A neighbor who sees the finished roof from the sidewalk learns nothing. A neighbor who watches thirty seconds of a slate course being reset learns what their own house probably has on it.

Out in Jeffersontown or Prospect the sign still works, so keep planting it. The feed is filling a gap here, not replacing something that already earns its keep.

You cannot walk a slate roof, so the camera lives on a ladder and in the street

Filming a steep slate or tile slope in the historic neighborhoods is physically different from filming a shingle roof in a subdivision, and it changes every shot you get.

On a Victorian in Old Louisville the crew is working off hook ladders, staging or a lift. Nobody is strolling a ridge with a phone in one hand, which rules out most of the walk and talk footage that fills roofing accounts elsewhere.

What you get instead is better anyway. Close work at the eave, a hand pulling a cracked slate out of a course, a box gutter opened up with a century of patches inside it. Shoot from the ladder, from the lift basket, and from the sidewalk looking up.

A clamp or a chest mount earns its keep here, because both hands are committed on a slope like that. A phone held one-handed on a hook ladder is a bad idea before it is a bad shot.

The lift usually means occupying a narrow street for part of a day, and a crowd gathers on its own. Somebody should be able to answer a neighbor's question without stopping the job, and street occupancy on those blocks is worth confirming with the city before the truck arrives.

Box gutters and turret flashing are subjects nobody in this town has filmed

The older housing here generates roof problems that almost no roofing content anywhere addresses, which makes them cheap attention for a company that does the work.

A box gutter built into the cornice, a turret with a dozen small hips meeting at a point, a slate roof with copper valleys, a shotgun house whose rear addition carries a low-slope roof the owner never thinks about. Those are ordinary jobs here and exotic on the internet.

Explain each one in the owner's words rather than the trade's. Most people with a box gutter do not know they have one and describe the symptom as water running down the inside of a wall.

Say plainly which of these is a repair and which usually points at a bigger project, and say that nobody can tell from a photograph which one a particular house has.

The material is durable in a way storm content never is. A box gutter explainer is as true in February as it was in June, and it is the thing a homeowner forwards to the relative who is helping them decide.

The messages land at three in the morning, and the answer decides the job

A freight and logistics economy runs on shifts, so a real part of this metro is awake and reading at hours no roofing office is open.

Somebody coming off a shift at one of the air freight or warehouse operations that anchor Kentuckiana does their household business between four and seven in the morning. The form gets filled in and the comment gets left inside that window.

Which means the response time that counts is not measured against your business day. A message answered at seven by a person catches somebody who is still awake. The same message answered at ten catches somebody asleep.

Write the profile for that reader. Say when a human actually reads messages and say what to do if water is coming in tonight, because a shift worker who has been told the truth will wait, and one left guessing calls the next name on the list.

It also changes when to publish. A clip that goes up in the evening is watched on the way into a night shift, and that audience is one nobody else in this trade is bothering to publish for.

How often to post, who carries the camera and what to do with a paid budget do not change between Louisville and anywhere else, and we handle those once on our roofing social media page at /industries/roofing/social-media.