St. Louis, MO

Social media for remodelers working a metro built out of brick

Solid brick decides what a kitchen or bath job here can do. There is no cavity in an exterior wall to hide a pipe in, no chase to run a hood duct up, and no cheap way to move a window. A homeowner standing in a century kitchen in Tower Grove or Webster Groves is carrying questions that all follow from that wall, and almost nobody in this market is answering them on camera. Everything below comes out of the masonry, because in this metro the masonry comes first.

A hood duct through solid brick is a hole you get to make once

Venting a range in a masonry house is a permanent, visible decision, and it is the question a brick house owner walks in with.

There is no chase. A hood on an exterior wall vents through the brick, and the cap ends up visible from the yard or the alley. On an interior wall the duct has to travel, which usually means a soffit, a joist bay, or a route that surfaces somewhere upstairs nobody wanted it.

Which makes the island range everybody has seen online a harder conversation here than a rendering suggests. Walking through the two or three real routes in a brick two story, with what each one costs you in ceiling height or cabinet space, is a video that stays useful for years because the wall is not going to change.

Catch the core when it happens. Nobody drills a second hole for a camera, so the shot exists only if something is propped and running before the bit touches the wall. Owners watch that clip the way people watch a tooth come out.

Then show the outside. What the cap looks like from the alley, how the brick was cut and made good around it, whether anybody on the sidewalk would notice. The fear was never the hole. It was the house looking wrong afterward.

Nothing wet goes in the outside wall, and that settles most layout arguments

Solid masonry with no cavity means the sink and the fixtures are locked to interior walls before anybody opens a catalog.

A supply line buried in a solid exterior wall here is a burst pipe waiting for the right January. Freeze-thaw works through this masonry every winter and there is no insulated cavity protecting anything sitting inside it.

So the sink stays near the drain and the supply that are already there, or the job becomes much larger than the homeowner pictured. A bath in a brick two story is usually stacked over the kitchen for the same reason, and moving it means opening a floor rather than moving a fixture.

Say that on camera before somebody falls in love with a window sink. Walking the four walls of a real kitchen and marking which ones can carry water is the most practical piece anyone could make in this category, and nothing like it exists here.

The same rule decides where a laundry can go, which comes up in nearly every one of these houses and usually gets answered after the machine has been bought.

Masonry footage brings masonry questions, and you are not a tuckpointer

Publishing honest video of brick invites an audience with a problem you do not solve, and the account drifts toward them if nobody stops it.

Post a clip of an open brick wall and the replies fill with tuckpointing, spalling and a chimney somebody has been worrying about since spring. Very few of those people are buying a kitchen.

The pull is real because those posts do well. Brick trouble is shared across the whole metro, so a masonry clip travels further than a cabinet clip, and a feed left to its own momentum turns into a masonry account that sells nothing.

Keep the ratio deliberate. Brick is the setting and the kitchen is the subject. When a masonry question is genuinely interesting, answer it in a sentence and get back into the room.

There is a version of this that pays, though. A short piece on what a mason had to do before your crew could hang cabinets on that wall keeps the brick in frame and keeps your own work in frame with it.

Rehabbers will never hire you, and they are how a Kirkwood homeowner finds you

The people buying brick two families in south city to work on themselves are not your buyer, and they are the reason your name travels.

South city rehab culture is loud and public. Somebody taking on a brick two family in Tower Grove, Dogtown or Soulard asks detailed questions where everyone can see them, and the answers come from other rehabbers within the hour.

They will not hire you for the kitchen. They will hire somebody eventually for the part they do not want to touch, and more to the point they are who a neighbor asks when a house on the block changes hands and the new owner wants a bath done properly.

So answer the technique question honestly rather than guarding it. The rehabber who learned something from you in February is the person typing your name into a thread in Maplewood or Webster Groves the following spring.

Everything that would be true for a remodeler in any city, we keep on one page at /industries/kitchen-bath-remodeling/social-media.

Questions we actually get

A client wants a range on the island. What do we tell them on camera?: Show the routes rather than giving a verdict. In a brick house the duct either goes through an exterior wall, which is permanent and visible outside, or it travels through a soffit or a joist bay to get somewhere it can leave. Filming that decision in a real kitchen answers the question for every owner of a similar house, and it is more useful than a rendering nobody can build.
We have no videographer. How do we catch something that happens once?: Prop the phone and let it run. The core through the brick, the wall opening behind the sink, the first cabinet going onto furring. None of it needs narration in the moment, and talking over silent footage afterward is easier than trying to perform while holding a tool. What it does need is a phone that is charged and propped before the work starts.
Our masonry posts outperform everything else. Should we make more of them?: No, and watch that pull carefully. Brick problems touch the whole metro so those clips travel, but the people sharing them are mostly looking for a mason. An account that follows its own numbers here ends up with an audience that cannot hire you. Keep the brick as the setting and keep the kitchen as the subject.
Is it worth answering rehabbers who will obviously never pay us?: Yes, because in this metro they are distribution. Somebody working on a brick two family in Soulard is asked constantly by neighbors who to call for the jobs they will not touch themselves. Answer the technique question plainly, take the twenty seconds it costs, and your name travels into conversations you are not part of.
When should we publish the damp wall video?: Late winter, while people can see it. The wall behind a cabinet run shows in March and looks fine by summer, so publish while a homeowner is standing in front of the stain rather than months after they stopped noticing. Hold it, republish it the following winter, and let the season do the targeting for you.

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 St. Louis

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.