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Capstone Bathroom Giveaway

One lucky Facebook fan won a free bathroom makeover. Here's how Capstone pulled it off.

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Capstone Bathroom Giveaway

One lucky Facebook fan won a free bathroom makeover. Here's how Capstone pulled it off.

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    Every house has a room that could use a little face lift. Or a complete overhaul. For Andrea Morais, that room was the master bath of her West Boylston, Mass., home. From the dated aesthetic to the crumbling tile job, the bathroom simply wasn't working for Morais and her family.

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    Morais told her local paper, the Banner, that idea of redoing the bathroom came up while she was refinancing her home. With no equity available, Morais's cousin suggested she enter Capstone General Contracting's Facebook contest for a bathroom giveaway.

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    Ultimately, Morais was one of more than two dozen homeowners that entered the contest, hosted by Capstone owners Christine and Charbel Najem. Christine created the contest as a way to drive traffic to the Worcester, Mass.-based company's Facebook page and improve the company's overall name recognition in the community.

    "We gave people a month to enter the contest, and they started posting pictures of their ugly bathrooms," Najem says. "We gave them about three weeks to vote, and it turned out to be a really good strategy to get people to hear about us."

    Morais's bathroom won the contest with more than 400 votes. Capstone added the project to their regular work schedule and got going on design and planning. The project took just 10 days to complete once Capstone received their work permit. "The town actually gave us a break on the permit price becasue they knew the job was a contest," Najem notes.

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    Because the project was small, detailed floorplans were unnecessary, and the project moved quickly. A traditional black-and-white tile scheme was selected for the walls and floor, and the toilet was upgraded to a water-efficient dual-flush model.

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    In addition to a new pedestal sink and updated faucet, a new bathtub and shower were also installed. The bathtub change-out presented the only tricky part of the renovation. Though a normal size by today's standards, the new tub was about 6 inches longer than the original, requiring the shower wall to be moved back slightly.

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    "The wall had to be moved out a little, which took away space from the storage area that had been behind the shower wall," Najem says. As a result, Morais lost most of the cabinet space which can be seen here.

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    Workers finished the narrow niche behind the new shower wall, shown here, with the same materials used for the rest of the bathroom. Najem says small shelves were added later allowing Morais to use the space for hand towels and other bathroom necessities. She notes that Morais's children chose the upbeat wall color.

Finding a way to make its company Facebook page fun and engaging, Capstone General Contracting, in Worcester, Mass., held an online bathroom giveaway contest. The effort was at once creative, manageable, and relatively inexpensive.

“You can spend a lot of money on fliers or ads, but we wanted to do something different,” says president Christine Najem. “We knew the cost of doing a bathroom would be minimal and that it would be a fun way to please a client and get people to ‘like’ our page.”

To run the contest, Najem created a contest page using Facebook’s built-in, fee-based functionality. Capstone fans were encouraged to visit the contest page, post photos of their ugly bathrooms, and spread the news about the contest. People without Facebook accounts could access the contest via Capstone’s website.

“We had about 25 completed entries, and then people were able to vote for their favorites if they ‘liked’ our page,” Najem says. The campaign drove up Facebook traffic, and Najem says the contest winner is now a raving fan and “marketing billboard” for the company — well worth the cost of labor and materials.

Capstone added the giveaway project to its standard job calendar, ensuring that it received the same attention as any paid-for remodel. “Just because it’s free doesn’t make it less of a job for us,” Najem says. “People think we’re going to take our time and not make it a priority, but that’s not how we view things. Contractors get a bad name for not keeping promises, and we believe in building our reputation on integrity and building great relationships [with our customers]."

Najem plans to build more buzz for future online contests, knowing this first run was a success. “Even for contests with smaller prizes like an iPad, people think there's probably a catch. So if we're giving away an $8,900 bathroom, then [they think] there definitely must be a catch,” she says. “I wanted to get 100 entries. Now that people know we’re serious about the giveaway and that there are no strings, I think we’ll definitely have more interest next time.”

—Lauren Hunter, associate editor, REMODELING.

This is a longer version of an article that appeared in the November 2011 issue of REMODELING.