Morgul Marketing

    Miami, FL

    A remodeling feed for kitchens that have to clear a building first

    A kitchen in a house is a design problem. A kitchen on the twenty-second floor of a Brickell tower is a design problem wrapped in a logistics problem wrapped in an approval problem, and the order runs in that direction. Owners arrive with a plan assembled from pictures they saved online, and a good deal of it cannot be built where they live. So the content that earns a call in Miami-Dade is evidence that you already know what a building will and will not permit, and that you can get a slab, a tub and a crew upstairs without the management office asking you to leave.

    Most owners arrive with a layout the building will not allow

    The wet walls, the stacks and the slab are settled before anyone picks a finish, and almost nobody shopping for a renovation knows that yet.

    An owner in Edgewater or Brickell has spent months saving pictures of islands with sinks in them. Whether that sink can move depends on where the stack runs and what the building permits in the slab, and the answer is often no.

    Publish the constraint rather than the finish. A short piece explaining why a kitchen in a tower usually stays roughly where it is, what can move, and what moving it costs in time and disruption, is the most useful thing an owner in this market can read.

    Do the same for flooring, because sound is what associations actually enforce. Many set an underlayment requirement, and the neighbor below is the one who reports a failure. Saying you build to the building's standard carries more weight than another photograph.

    The floor structure does some of the deciding too. Where a slab is post-tensioned, coring for a relocated drain is limited to what the structural drawings allow, which explains the missing island sink better than taste ever has, and it is the same explanation for every unit in that line.

    A stone slab will not fit in the passenger elevator

    Getting material into the unit is the part of a high-rise renovation that goes wrong, and it is also the part that makes the best content.

    A full slab, a cast iron tub, a run of tall cabinets and a sheet of glass all have to travel through a loading dock, a padded freight elevator with fixed dimensions, and a corridor with corners in it.

    Some of that means fabricating in sections, some means a delivery window booked weeks ahead, and some means discovering that the piece a client fell in love with cannot physically reach their floor.

    Film it. The dock, the protection going down, the piece going up, the fit at the other end. Owners have never seen any of it, and the building managers watching your account are judging precisely this.

    It is also the honest way to talk about schedule. A kitchen in a tower runs longer than a kitchen in a house for reasons that have nothing to do with your crew, and showing why beats explaining it later.

    Book the finished-kitchen shoot before you hand back the keys

    The day you demobilize is the day your access ends, and a finished tower kitchen is remarkably hard to get back into.

    While the job is live you hold a badge, an elevator reservation and a reason to be in the building. Once the punch list closes, a photographer needs the owner present, the management office willing and a slot on the building's calendar.

    Owners are less willing by then as well. The unit is furnished, the family has moved back in, and the enthusiasm that would have produced a yes has turned into a preference for quiet.

    So put the shoot in the schedule with the other close-out items and give it a date. Treat it the way you treat the stone template: a fixed event with a named person responsible, not something to arrange when everybody has a free afternoon.

    Shoot for the glass as well as the room. Tower kitchens are often open to a wall of windows, so the space is either lit by it or blown out by it and the good hour is short. Frame toward the interior, keep the view out of the wide shots, and get a written yes on anything that shows it.

    The second kitchen in the same building is your cheapest job

    Once you have cleared a tower you hold an advantage there that no advertising budget buys anywhere else.

    Your insurance is on file, the renovation packet is assembled once, the dock protocol is known, the elevator scheduler takes your call and the front desk recognizes your crew. The next job in that building starts cheaper and safer than a first job anywhere.

    So organize the account by building rather than by style. A small, consistent set from every tower you have worked in, with unit numbers and views kept out of frame, is legible to exactly the people who live there.

    Ask satisfied owners to name the building rather than the street. In Miami-Dade, a review that names a tower is worth more than a general compliment, because the next reader is looking for somebody who has already been upstairs.

    Everything general about a remodeling feed, who films, how often to publish and what to do with a small promotion budget, holds in Miami as it does anywhere and sits on our kitchen and bath social media page rather than being repeated here.

    Questions we actually get

    Our work comes from designers and repeat owners. What is a feed actually for?
    For the management office and for the owner two floors up. A building's staff decide whether your crew is welcome back long before an owner does, and a neighbor in the same line is the likeliest next job you will get in the county. Both can see how you protect a corridor, book a dock and leave a lobby. Neither is going to call your designer to ask.
    Can we post the view from a finished unit?
    Only with a written yes on that specific point. A wall of glass identifies the building and roughly the floor to anyone who lives here, so a wide shot publishes an address the owner never agreed to. Some are glad to show it because the view is why they bought. Ask each one, and keep the glass out of the default frame.
    Should the account run in Spanish or English?
    Both, written rather than translated. A caption run through a translator reads wrong to anyone who speaks the language, and this audience notices immediately. If nobody on the team can write it naturally, post in English and answer messages in whichever language they arrive in, which is where most of the conversation happens anyway.
    An owner keeps asking in the comments why their island cannot have a sink. What do we post?
    Show where the wet locations sit in that line and why they sit there. The stack, the slab and the fall available under a floor with nowhere to hide a drain decide it, and a marked-up plan in a short clip explains it faster than any reply in a thread. The same clip answers the question for every unit in the line, which is where the next year's work tends to come from.
    The buildings we work in will not let us film anything. Is there anything left to post?
    Plenty, and most of it is better. The shop, the stone yard, the slab being tagged, the piece being cut, the loading and protection sequence, and explanations of what can and cannot move in a tower kitchen. None of that needs a badge, and it demonstrates competence more directly than a finished room does.

    What is different here

    Work that disturbs paint in housing built before 1978 brings federal lead-safe certification and disclosure obligations, which affects a meaningful share of older coastal stock. Permitting and inspection sequencing is municipal, and in condominium buildings an association's own approval process frequently governs timing more than the building department does.

    Kitchen & Bath Remodeling Social Media Strategy & Execution elsewhere

    Written by KC Thompson, Morgul Marketing.

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