Filming roofs on raised houses that four relatives own

A raised house puts the ladder on soft ground, and the setup is the shot

Before a crew touches a roof here they solve a footing problem nobody outside the trade has ever seen, and it is the most watchable thing on the job.

A pier and beam house sits high, the ground under the ladder is soft, and a high water table means it does not firm up much between rains. The crew is laying boards, checking footing and working at a height a slab house never asks for.

Film that. The walk from the truck when the street is narrow, the ladder being footed, the height the first person reaches before they can see anything at all. It explains a price better than any conversation at a kitchen table.

It also answers a question the homeowner is embarrassed to ask, which is why one company quoted more than another for what looks like the same roof. Access is a real line item here and almost nobody says so out loud.

Dawn is the practical window. The crew is up early to beat the afternoon, the light across a slate roof in the Garden District or a low-slope roof in Bywater is better than anything you could stage, and nobody is holding a phone at two in the afternoon in August.

The house belongs to four relatives in three cities, and your video is what gets forwarded

A large share of the older housing here is held by families rather than by a single decision maker, and the person who calls you is rarely the person who approves the number.

One relative lives in the house, another lives out of state, and a third is the one who reads everything carefully. A proposal reaches one of them. A short video reaches all three inside an hour.

So make material that survives being forwarded without you in the room. What the work is, why the price is what it is, what happens if it waits another year, and what the difference between two bids usually turns out to be.

Louisiana runs on civil law and property here follows rules that do not match the rest of the country, so never opine in public on who is entitled to authorize work on a family property. Say it is worth confirming with their own attorney or notary and stay firmly on the roof.

Expect the decision to take longer than it would with one owner, and let the account carry the wait. A family talking it over across three cities takes weeks, and the company still publishing ordinary work through those weeks is the one they call back rather than the one they have to look up again.

Where the water lands next to a settling house is your subject

On low ground with a high water table, what happens to roof water after it leaves the roof matters more than the pitch it came off, and nobody has published a word about it.

A downspout that dumps beside a pier is a different problem here than it is on high ground with real drainage. Owners feel it as a door that sticks and a floor that slopes, and they call somebody about the foundation rather than about the roof.

So film the boring half. Where the gutter runs, where the downspout ends, where the water goes once it hits the ground, and what a week of rain does to a yard that never fully dries.

Be clear about the edge of your trade. A roofer can say where the water is being sent. Whether a house is moving is a question for somebody who does that work, and saying so on camera reads as competence rather than as a dodge.

The subject carries through the wet stretch of the year when a roof cannot be worked on anyway. A rain week is the moment the question is live in somebody's head, and it is the one roofing topic in this city that gets more interesting while it is pouring.

In a review district the material on the roof was not the owner's choice

On anything visible from a street in the protected parts of this city, the covering, the color and often the detail were settled by a review process before the owner met a contractor.

An owner in the French Quarter, the Garden District or Marigny finds that out late and badly, usually after somebody quoted them a material they cannot use. A feed that shows what an approved roof actually looks like on a Creole cottage or a shotgun house is doing something no brochure does.

Keep it descriptive rather than advisory. Show the work, name the district, and leave what is allowed to the commission rather than to a roofer with an opinion.

The honest part is the waiting. Say what the timeline generally looks like and say that it sits outside your control, because an owner who was warned is patient and an owner who was surprised writes about it later.

Those photographs travel further than anything else you publish in this metro. A neighbor on a block of Creole cottages can see their own house in yours, which is not true in a subdivision where every roof already matches.

Cadence, who carries the camera, how to answer a claim question and what to do with paid money are the same here as anywhere, and we cover those once on our roofing social media page at /industries/roofing/social-media.