New Orleans, LA

Social media for remodelers working raised houses in a protected city

A remodeler here films in conditions that fight back. The older parishes are built on piers with open ground underneath, and the air under a raised house in August will fog a phone lens in seconds. What happens on a visible front elevation gets reviewed by people who never signed your contract. The person who did sign it may own the house with somebody else. And an ordinary afternoon can put water in the street before the crew has closed a wall. A social plan that ignores any of those was written for another market and will not survive a summer in Orleans Parish.

Get under the raised house first, before the lens fogs and the crew loses the morning

The conditions that make this work hard are the same conditions that ruin the footage, so filming has to be scheduled around them.

Carry a phone out of an air conditioned room into the air under a raised house in summer and the lens fogs solid. Waiting it out costs several minutes every time, which is why crews stop bothering and the work under the house never gets shot at all.

Send the phone under first and let it sit while the crew gets set up, or keep it in a truck that is not running cold. Small habit, and it decides whether under-house footage exists.

Film that part early. Crawl work in August is finished with people by late morning, and nobody is narrating anything at two in the afternoon in this humidity.

Light it rather than fighting it. Under a raised house you are working off a work light in one hand, so set the light down, pick one position and let the camera hold still. A narrated tour through the piers looks like nothing and takes three attempts.

The front elevation of a protected house is not yours to publish mid-job

What may be shown here is decided by more parties than the one who signed your contract.

Historic district review governs what changes on a visible exterior across much of the older city. Work in progress on a front elevation, posted publicly, is an invitation for a neighbor or a preservation group to make a call before the process has finished running.

So keep in-progress exterior work off the feed until the outcome is settled. The interior, the rear of the house and the space underneath are yours to film freely, and on a shotgun or a Creole cottage that is where the kitchen and the bath sit anyway.

Working from the rear solves a second problem. In the French Quarter and the Garden District the front of a house is photographed by strangers all day, and owners there are more careful about an address appearing than owners anywhere else in the metro.

None of this stops you showing the finished exterior once everything has run its course. The order matters more than the subject does.

Community property means the signature you have may not cover the whole house

Louisiana runs on civil law rather than the common law every other state uses, and one consequence lands directly on the release form in your truck.

Property acquired during a marriage here is generally owned by both spouses together. The person who called you, met the crew and picked the tile may not be the only owner of the house you are about to publish.

Which makes a one line photo release copied from a national template a thin thing to lean on. Have a Louisiana attorney look at what you use, once, and then use the same form every time rather than deciding at a kitchen island in Uptown on a Friday afternoon.

In practice it costs nothing. Ask early who is on the title, get both names on the form when there are two, and keep the signed copy in the job file rather than in somebody's messages.

Tenants complicate the frame as well. A double in the Marigny or Bywater usually has somebody living on the other side of a shared wall who never met you, and their door, their mail and their car are in your establishing shot whether you intended it or not.

The wall gets closed before the afternoon rain, and nobody films that

Drainage and pumping mean an ordinary summer downpour can put water in the street, so the crew's day is sequenced around the sky rather than around the clock.

An open wall, a floor with the decking up, a bath with the drain disconnected. Each of those has a version that is safe until tomorrow and a version that is not, and here the deciding factor is often a storm that arrives between lunch and quitting time.

So the crew closes up early and covers what cannot be closed. That routine is invisible to the owner and it is precisely what they are afraid of, because everybody in Lakeview or Gentilly knows a house that took on water while it was open.

Film it once. Plastic taped down, tools up off the floor, material stacked on blocks instead of on the slab, the drain capped before anybody leaves. Owners ask about this constantly and almost nobody has put it on video.

The parts of a social plan that would hold for a remodeler in any city, we wrote down once at /industries/kitchen-bath-remodeling/social-media.

Questions we actually get

Can we post exterior work on a house in a historic district?: Be careful with anything in progress on a visible elevation. Review governs what may change out front, and a video of work underway can prompt a complaint from a neighbor or a preservation group before the process has run its course. Interiors, the rear and the underside of the house are safe ground, and on a shotgun or a Creole cottage that is where the rooms you are selling happen to be.
Who actually has to sign a release before we publish a house?: Everyone with an ownership interest, which in Louisiana is a real question rather than a formality. Community property means a house bought during a marriage generally belongs to both spouses, so a form signed by the person who hired you may not cover it. Ask who is on the title at the start of the job, and have a Louisiana attorney approve the form you use so you are not improvising per house.
Do we need a drone or a real camera?: No. Under a raised house a drone is useless and a large camera is in the way, and the rear of a protected house does not need altitude. A phone, a clip-on work light and a free hand is the entire kit. Put the money into a second light instead, because the places worth filming here are all dark.
Our crews say there is nothing to film on a bath gut down here.: There is more than on a slab job anywhere else. The drain run between piers, the sill that had gone soft, the blocking, the floor checked with a level before anybody talks about tile, the whole thing closed up before an afternoon storm. Ask a crew lead to say what they are looking at and why it matters, and that is the video.
August is our worst month for filming. What do we do about it?: Move the hard shots to the front of the day and stop pretending otherwise. Under-house and exterior work gets filmed before late morning or it does not get filmed well, and afternoons are for interior work in a conditioned room. Bank the crawl space material in the cooler months when a crew will tolerate a few extra minutes with a phone.

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.

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Written by KC Thompson, Morgul Marketing.

Talk to us about social media for kitchen and bath remodelers in New Orleans

Tell us what you are working with and we will say what we would do first, and what we would leave alone. A real answer, not a pitch deck.