Stop 1 of 8 · Daily
The lead
A Houzz message or a two-line Instagram DM turned into a booked consultation, with the price question answered from your own numbers.
What lands in the inbox
Lina gets three shapes of first contact. A Houzz message with four photos and a room type. An Instagram DM that says hi, do you do bathrooms, and nothing else. A referral text with a first name and a phone number. None of them contain enough to decide whether the job deserves one of the week's consultation slots, and the showroom only has so many.
So the work here is not writing a warmer reply. It is getting from a two-line message to a booked appointment with five facts in hand, in about four minutes, before the same message reaches two other remodelers.
The five facts before you book
| What you need | What it decides |
|---|---|
| Room and scope: refresh, same footprint, or walls moving | Whether the designer or Lina takes the consultation |
| A date they are working toward | Whether the crew calendar can hold it at all |
| A budget bracket, not an exact number | Whether selections start at good, better or best |
| Who else signs | Whether both people need to be in the room |
| The house: age, occupied during work, stairs | What the PM has to plan around |
Claude can pull three of those five straight out of the message and the photos. The other two are the questions you ask.
The price question
This is the one place Claude will hurt you. Homeowners ask price in the first message, every time. Lina keeps one file called Ranges 2026: her low and high per square foot for kitchens and baths at three finish levels, plus what a plumbing move or a wall removal adds. Claude answers price questions from that file or it does not answer them.
[paste the Houzz message and attach the photos] This is a new lead for my kitchen and bath remodeling company. Read it the way a remodeler would. First tell me what the message and photos already tell me about the room, the scope and the condition. Then list only the questions I still need answered before I give up a consultation slot. Then draft a reply of five sentences or fewer that answers what they actually asked, asks at most three of those questions, and offers a showroom visit Thursday afternoon or Saturday morning. No price, no start date, no comment on any other contractor.
[upload Ranges 2026] [paste the lead message] Answer their price question using only the ranges in the file, naming the finish level each range belongs to and saying plainly that the real number comes out of the consultation. If the room or finish level they described is not in the file, write [range] instead of a number and tell me which line I need to add. Four sentences.
Draft three replies to this Instagram DM, each under thirty words, each ending with a different question that would tell me the most about the job: [paste the DM]. Then tell me which one you would send to someone who has never remodeled before, and why.