New Orleans, LA

Social media for window and door work on raised houses and settled openings

Owners of Creole cottages, shotgun houses and raised doubles can tell within a few seconds of video whether the crew in it has worked on a house like theirs. The tells are physical. Where a ladder stands on soft ground under a raised house. What a crew does with an opening that went out of square years ago and is never coming back. Whether the wall is closed before the sky opens on an August afternoon. Content that skips those three was written for a slab house in a dry climate, and a reader in Bywater, Mid-City or Algiers will know it on sight. Content that faces them is the cheapest proof this trade can publish.

Every sill on a raised house starts above your head

Pier and beam construction across the older city puts the first floor openings out of reach from the yard, and the ground under the ladder is not helping.

On a raised house the sills begin above eye level from the yard, so what a national install video shows, somebody stepping up to a window from a driveway, does not exist here. A crew is working from a ladder set on soft ground, often with a plank under the feet, sometimes off the gallery instead.

The front steps land close to the sidewalk on many of these houses, so there is no room to set staging where you would want it. That is why a job on a raised double takes a different number of hands and a different number of days than the same count of openings in Metairie or Kenner.

Publish that difference. A homeowner in Uptown or the Bywater who has been quoted by a company used to slab houses is trying to work out why two prices are so far apart, and the answer is standing in their side yard.

It also settles the question underneath every inquiry from a raised house: has this crew done one before. Anybody who has knows about the plank, the soft ground and the gallery. Anybody who has not shows a video of a driveway.

A house that settled leaves an opening that will never be square

Soft ground and a high water table move houses here, and a window job has to be honest about what that means before anything gets ordered.

Subsidence works slowly and permanently. A house that has settled on its piers carries openings that are wider at one side than the other, with a head that is no longer level and a reveal that will not run parallel to anything.

It leaves a real choice with no perfect answer. A unit set plumb sits inside a crooked opening and the gap tells on it. A unit set to the opening looks right beside the trim and wrong beside the floor. Custom sizes help and they do not fix the geometry.

The customer who was never told assumes the crew hung it badly. That single misunderstanding starts more arguments in this trade locally than anything else, and it is entirely preventable with content made months before the sale.

So show it. A level on a jamb before anything comes out, a measurement at the head and another at the sill, and a plain explanation of which compromise you would choose and why. Nobody watching that thinks you are making excuses. They think you have seen their house before.

Nobody leaves an opening open past noon in August

From early summer into the fall the afternoon sky opens most days, and that fact runs the install calendar whether anyone plans around it or not.

Crews here open and close one opening at a time through the summer. Old cypress and plaster do not forgive an afternoon of rain blowing into a room, so a wall that is open at ten is buttoned up well before the weather arrives.

It stretches the work. The same house takes more days in August than in March, and the days start earlier. A customer who was expecting a two day job and is watching a crew leave at one in the afternoon needs to have been told why in advance.

That rhythm is worth publishing on its own. What time the crew arrives, what gets opened, what gets closed before lunch, and what a summer schedule does to a whole house job. It answers the fear that sits behind every summer inquiry, which is a house standing open when the sky turns.

It also shapes what you can promise. A summer install date is a weather dependent date, and saying so plainly, in the same place you sell, is what keeps a delay from turning into a complaint.

In a review district the meeting comes before the order

Across much of Orleans Parish, what changes on a visible exterior goes in front of a review body, so the buyer's calendar has a hearing on it long before it has an install date.

That reader is not slow. They are early. Drawings, photographs and a submission come first, the meeting happens when it happens, and only then does anybody talk about ordering material. A homeowner in the Marigny or the Garden District is often thinking about this months ahead of a job.

What serves them is sequence rather than product. What you prepare, what a set of drawings usually includes, how the measure fits before or after, how long a replica profile takes to build once a decision exists. Nobody selling windows gets to predict how a body will vote, and the content that pretends otherwise is the content that gets a homeowner into trouble.

The parishes are not interchangeable here either. Orleans Parish brings historic fabric and review. Jefferson Parish brings postwar slab housing in Metairie and Kenner that fails in completely different ways. St. Tammany Parish sits across the water with its own governments and its own buyers. One feed can serve all three, but only if the work you show looks like more than one kind of house.

The general guidance for a window and door feed lives at /industries/window-door-replacement/social-media, and this page assumes it rather than repeating it. What that page cannot do is tell a Louisiana reader that you understand a project whose first date is a meeting.

Questions we actually get

Does anybody here need the raised house explained, or does everyone already know?: The people who grew up in one know. Plenty of buyers here did not, because they bought in Lakeview or Gentilly or moved down from somewhere with basements, and they price a window job as though a crew can walk up to the opening. Explaining it costs you one video and saves an argument on every quote where a lower number came from a company that has never worked off a plank.
An owner asked in the comments why their new window looks crooked. Do we answer publicly?: Yes, once and carefully, and then make the video you should have made a year ago. Say what settling does to an opening, why a unit can be plumb and still look wrong beside old trim, and what the alternatives were. Other readers have the same house and the same question. The answer only reads as a defense when it turns up for the first time after somebody has complained.
Summer is our busiest season and our hardest one to promise dates in. What do we say?: Say the truth in advance, in public. Crews open one opening at a time and close the wall before the afternoon, so a house takes more days in August than in March. Homeowners here already know why. What annoys them is discovering it on the second day from a crew packing up at one o'clock when nobody warned them.
Nothing gets ordered for months on a review district job. Is content aimed at those owners wasted?: It is the longest lead in the market and the most likely to be forwarded. A homeowner preparing a submission is reading everything, showing what they find to a neighbor and to whoever is helping them, and they remember the company whose material explained the sequence. The order comes late, and it tends to come with the rest of the house attached.
A Metairie homeowner said none of our posts look like their house. Are they right?: Probably, and it is worth fixing. Slab houses in Jefferson Parish fail in their own way: aluminum frames, sliders off their track, seals gone in units that are only decades old. If everything you publish is cypress sash on a raised house, a Metairie reader concludes you are a restoration outfit and calls somebody else. Show both, and say which is which.

What is different here

Product approval is the part of this market that genuinely changes between counties. Miami-Dade and Broward sit inside the High Velocity Hurricane Zone and generally work through Miami-Dade Notices of Acceptance, while Palm Beach County work is usually documented under statewide Florida Product Approval against a local design wind speed. The two are not interchangeable on a permit, so approval language is a compliance statement rather than a marketing one, and it is worth having a dealer check their own documentation before it goes on a page.

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Written by KC Thompson, Morgul Marketing.

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