Washington, DC

Social media for a remodeler whose job site shares a wall with the audience

A remodeling account in this metro is read by people standing very close to the work. The neighbor who lost a parking space for six weeks. The household on the other side of a party wall. The family that arrived last year on a federal posting. Very little of the ordinary advice for this trade survives contact with a rowhouse. The kitchen sits in the middle of a deep, narrow house with no window in it, material comes up an alley and through a back gate, the curb outside belongs to somebody with a permit sticker, and many of the households here work for a government that limits what they may say about a vendor. Those four facts decide most of what a kitchen and bath account can do in the District.

A mid-block rowhouse kitchen has no window, so the light rides in the van

The house type that defines the District decides what has to be on the truck before anybody films anything.

A rowhouse is deep and narrow, with glass at the front and the back and nothing in between. The kitchen usually sits in the middle. At noon in June that room is dark, and in January the working day ends in the dark as well.

Waiting for good light in a rowhouse means waiting for something that is never arriving. Two battery lights and a stand travel with the crew, and the room gets shot with the same setup on every job so a warm white cabinet reads the same in December as it does in May.

Set the white balance once and leave it alone. A kitchen in the middle of a Capitol Hill rowhouse has no daylight to balance against, so whatever the camera decides on its own will drift from job to job and your finishes will look like they drifted with it.

The same fact is worth saying out loud to buyers. Owners on those blocks have lived with a dark middle room for years, and what they want to know is what can actually be done about it. A room lit honestly rather than lit to flatter is the version they can believe when they walk into it on the first morning.

Everything you install has to fit up the alley and through the back gate

A rowhouse block has no driveway, so the first question a customer has is whether the job is physically possible at their house.

Material for a mid-block house comes off a van in the alley, through a back gate, and up a stair narrower than the cabinet run it is carrying. Some blocks in Shaw and Petworth have that alley. Some do not, and then the sofa-sized box comes through the front door and down the whole length of the house.

Owners know this and it worries them. A homeowner on Capitol Hill who has watched a neighbor's refrigerator stall in a doorway is asking a feasibility question long before they are asking a design question.

So the useful thing to publish is the route, not the arrangement. The gate, the turn at the bottom of the stair, the panel ordered in two pieces because one would not make the corner, the appliance measured against a doorway before anybody bought it.

It also sets your service area honestly. If your crews will not take a mid-block job without alley access, let the account say so, because a site visit that ends at the front steps costs a morning nobody gets back.

A federal employee cannot endorse your company, however happy they are

In a metro whose largest employer is the federal government, the testimonial you were about to ask for is one your customer may not be free to give.

Federal employees are held to rules about using their position to endorse a business. A delighted customer in the District, Arlington or Bethesda may genuinely want to help you and still not be able to appear as a government employee saying so.

The line is about how they appear rather than whether they speak. The agency name, the title, the badge, the office backdrop and the uniform stay out of frame. A homeowner talking about their kitchen in their kitchen is a homeowner. The same person in front of a seal is a problem for them, not for you.

Clearance holders add a second layer. Somebody working for a federal contractor on sensitive programs has ordinary reasons to keep their address, their household and their weekly schedule off a public feed, and they will rarely explain why. Take the no at face value and do not ask twice.

Treat it as ordinary here rather than as an edge case, and build the account so it does not lean on faces. Rooms, access, sequence and finished work carry the argument, and none of them require anybody to say a word on camera.

The curb outside that job belongs to a neighbor with a permit sticker

A rowhouse block has no driveway, so your container and your van are sitting in public space that somebody else pays to park in.

Residential permit parking, a narrow street and a dumpster in front of the house make a remodel a neighborhood event before it is a kitchen. The neighbor who lost that space for six weeks is reading your account, and on Capitol Hill or in Columbia Heights they are on the block's mailing list as well.

Occupying public space is a separate permission from a separate office than the one that inspects your framing, and it is the reason a start date on a rowhouse block can move after everything else is ready. What you can publish is your own practice: where the crew parks, how long the container sits, who sweeps the alley on Friday, what hours the saw runs.

Publish it before you need it rather than after. A short seasonal note about how your crews handle the curb, the dust and the alley does more for a bid in Petworth than a finished photograph, because everyone reading it has lived next door to a job that went badly.

Anything about this channel that would read the same for a remodeler in another city sits on our kitchen and bath social media page at /industries/kitchen-bath-remodeling/social-media, and what is left here is the part that only happens on a rowhouse block.

Questions we actually get

Our customer works for a federal agency and offered to record something. Can we use it?: Take the offer and keep their job out of it. A federal employee should not appear to endorse a vendor in an official capacity, so no agency name, no title, no badge and no office backdrop. Filmed in their own kitchen talking about their own kitchen, they are a homeowner like any other. If they hold a clearance and would rather not appear at all, that is a normal answer in this metro and worth planning around rather than pushing on.
There is no alley on this block. Does that change what we show?: It changes the job, so yes. A front-loaded delivery on a narrow street means the box comes through the living room and down the length of the house, and the protection you run is different. Showing that route answers the question a mid-block owner in Shaw or Petworth is actually asking, which is whether their house can take the work at all.
Do we need a photographer for a rowhouse kitchen?: You need lights more than you need a photographer. The middle of a rowhouse has no window, so somebody arriving at the golden hour finds the same dark room your phone found. Two battery lights, a stand and the same white balance every time will do more for how your work looks than a booked shoot will, and they are available on the day the cabinets go in rather than three weeks later.
How do we handle the neighbor sharing a wall with our demolition?: Tell them before the saw starts, and let the account show what your crews do about it afterward. On a party wall the noise is in somebody's living room whether they agreed to it or not, and that household is on the same block list as your next customer. Hours the crew actually keeps, a swept alley and a curb put back are the things worth publishing, because the neighbor is reading and so is everyone they talk to.
A client asked us not to name the neighborhood. Is that unusual here?: Not unusual at all. This labor market includes people whose employers have views about how findable they are, and a request not to say where they live is one you will hear more often here than a remodeler in most cities would. Agree it at contract, write it into the file, and keep a second way to describe the job so the work can still be shown. The room was always the evidence, not the address.

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 Washington

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.