Mid-century homes weren’t built with modern insulation standards in mind. Many of our homes leak heat in cold climates or let in too much warmth in hot ones.
The good news is that these homes often have excellent air seals thanks to plaster walls and old-growth materials, which provide a solid foundation for energy improvements.
Easy Wins for Cozy Living
If you’re looking to make your home more comfortable without a major remodel, start with the low-hanging fruit:
- Attic Insulation: One of the simplest ways to improve energy efficiency.
- Basement Sealing: Insulating rim joists can make a big difference with minimal effort.
- Air Sealing: Check around windows, doors, and outlets to prevent drafts.
These are straightforward projects that you can tackle yourself or with professional help.
Bigger Remodeling?
If you’re planning a larger remodel, it’s the perfect time to incorporate insulation upgrades. Whether you’re redoing your roof, replacing siding, or gutting a kitchen or bathroom, adding insulation to walls, ceilings, and floors can dramatically improve energy performance.
Pro tip: Coordinate insulation work with other upgrades like new wiring or ventilation systems for maximum efficiency.
Quick Design tip for your…bathroom
Your design tip this week is about bathrooms, and specifically how to plan the perfect lighting for every mood and task you use a bathroom for. Because you use a bathroom in many different purposes and at different times of day, start by making sure you have good general light. And that begins with daylight.
A quick summary of my bathroom lighting advice:
- Consider adding skylights or light tubes to bring more daylight into the space.
- Aim to have light on two sides of the vanity mirror so you can light your face from both directions.
- Put everything on a dimmer.
Get all my Mid Mod Bath Update Essentials here:
Mid Mod House Feature of the Week
Built-in Planter
Built-in planters are a classic mid-century feature. They blur the line between indoors and outdoors, creating a seamless connection with nature. Whether you restore an original planter or design a new one, they’re a fantastic way to add character and charm to your home.
Read the Full Episode Transcript
Della Hansmann
So the odds are that your mid-century home is not very well insulated. If you live in a cold climate, you’re probably leaking heat in the winter, and if you live in a warm place, you might be putting more energy into air conditioning than you’d really like to.
Della Hansmann
So today I’m going to talk about what is the current status of insulation in your mid-century home, and how to improve on that in a number of ways, going from easy you can do this without any kind of major remodel effort to what you should bake into a bigger remodel plan, because it will never be so easy again at any other time.
Della Hansmann
We’ve also got a design tip on zipping up your bathroom with natural and artificial light and a house feature front door planters. I can’t wait to get into it. Let’s go.
Della Hansmann
Hey there. Welcome back to mid mod remodel. This is the show about updating MCM homes, helping you match a mid-century home to your modern life. I’m your host. Della Hansmann, architect and mid-century ranch enthusiast. You’re listening to Episode 1907 quick reminder that mid mod Midwest is booking the design projects right now that we’ll be preparing master plans for in 2025 so if you’ve got things you want to do to do to your house next year, now’s the right time to reach out and schedule a call for you and I to talk about your plans.
Della Hansmann
These early chats are always so much fun. It’s chance for us to get to know each other, for you to ask about our master plan process, and for me to give a little initial feedback on what seems practical with your house and your design goals. We’ll get the ball rolling at the end of this year and have sustainable, functional, beautiful solutions coming in hot for you right after the calendar rolls over. If you’re curious about today’s episode adding insulation, you might be interested in the general sustainability of living in a mid-century home, and how to improve it.
Della Hansmann
This question, the sustainability of mid-century houses, is actually part of my back story. I don’t talk about it as much these days, but I became an architect because I wanted to find a better, more world friendly way for Americans to live in houses. I chose my graduate school architecture program because it was, at that time, one of the few schools that was specifically focused on sustainability and green design in architecture, I think, and I hope, this has changed somewhat in the intervening decade and a half, but at that time, it was somewhat unique in that way.
Della Hansmann
And my first job out of school was very intentionally chosen to take me away from the basic steppingstone for young architects, which is a white collar office job designing skyscraper bathrooms, and instead I became the draftsman office aide in gal Friday to a tiny firm that built timber frame structures out of entire trees. That is, they would cut down a relatively young tree from a local Wisconsin forest and use not just the trunk but also the branches, specifically the Y connection, where two major branches separated for its inherent strength.
Della Hansmann
This is common sense. If you think about the strength of a tree form, it’s always stronger before you start to cut some of its fibers, just like a carrot is stronger and straighter before you slice it in half and it goes twisty on you. So we worked with those local tree structures and built beautiful, sustainable houses for people with exposed whole tree timber frame structures inside them, as well as sod roofs, straw bale walls, passive solar design and a plethora of beautiful, handcrafted details.
Della Hansmann
The office I worked in was a log cabin in the woods on my boss’s property, heated by a wood stove and powered with PV panels. Today, whole trees is a large company that focuses on replacing and disrupting the steel industry. It’s trying to replace the structure of big buildings like grocery stores, industrial buildings and public spaces with wood, with whole tree structures, rather than with steel.
Della Hansmann
And that’s always been their goal. We got from little houses to big steel structures by proving the strength of whole trees timber frame by running destructive tests that is crushing these trees until they fractured at the Forest Products Laboratory here in Madison, and one of the last projects I worked on with them before I moved on to another residential design firm was running and helping and running the grants for some of that testing.
Della Hansmann
This popped into my head recently when whole trees on their Instagram page post a picture of me and a colleague working on some of that testing. So what’s the crossover between destructive structural testing, working in a timber frame, log cabin office, and the work I do today, remodeling mid-century homes?
Della Hansmann
Well, I still think of the work that I do as an act of sustainability, keeping the materials out of the landfill, keeping people in relatively inner near city, small town homes that are built at the right size and the right scale in walkable, lovely neighborhoods. So I’m gonna post a link in today’s show notes to an episode I did quite a while ago on why your mid-century home is already very sustainable, which I think you’ll find interesting in light of this episode, the reasons are its location, its size, its old growth materials.
Della Hansmann
Now, if you want your house to be even more sustainable, there are things you can do to it, and adding insulation is just one component of improving sustainability. I urge you, if you’re thinking about making remodeling choices to your house, think not just about lowering its. Current, existing energy cost, but also keeping its resource footprint low, and thinking about the other ways that you can generally fit it out to be a long, lasting, long term resource low home. This topic is important to me right now.
Della Hansmann
So if you’re curious about other ways to add sustainability and green philosophy to your existing mid-century home, let me know what’s on your mind. I might put together a mini-series that covers some of these sustainability oriented topics in depth in the near future. Okay, um, quick tease before I let you go. We are one week out from Thanksgiving today. Wait what? Yeah, that is, that is how time works, and that means we are looking at Christmas around the corner. This is an excellent time of year to support small businesses that you care about.
Della Hansmann
A couple of years ago, I did an episode and a blog post on great mid-century small businesses. And if you want to go there right now and find someone to buy for your Christmas list from or bookmark it for when you do start thinking about holiday giving, that is going to be episode and show notes. Page 1007, 1007, so have a look at that. I also personally jump into the Black Friday holiday shopping madness by offering a sale on our courses and paid resources next week.
Della Hansmann
So you want to keep an eye on your inbox for that. In fact, I’ve got the attention span of a NAT right now. So if you’re feeling the same, how about I just start that sale at the moment, if you want to go right over and get a discount on any of our mid-century design clinics or the master plan in a month program, or even ready to remodel, you’ll find that all at our learn with us page. Go to the show notes to find those links.
Della Hansmann
Now it’s time for our mid mod design tip of the week. Your design tip this week is about bathrooms, and specifically how to plan the perfect lighting for every mood and task you use a bathroom for. Because you use a bathroom in many different purposes and at different times of day, start by making sure you have good general light, and that begins with daylight.
Della Hansmann
Drench your bathroom in daylight, even if your bathroom has plentiful windows, think about adding skylights or light tubes to bring even more daylight into the space. Light tubes can be easier to install and cheaper. They can also be paired with a can light. So basically, they’re both a surface mounted light and a Daylight System. Fixed skylights can give you a view of the sky, and they can either have a straight or an angled drywall return to spread the light or shed it in a particular place, like maybe over a bathtub or a shower.
Della Hansmann
You might also want to think about adding a window, if you’ve got privacy considerations, keep that window above head height, or add a translucent finish, or reeded glass for privacy. Then, once you’ve set up your bathroom with good daylight, you give it good general light, a couple of bright lights at the ceiling, or maybe just all of your other various task.
Della Hansmann
Lights have good brightness factors, big bright bulbs that you can also put on a dimmer, because there will be times when you don’t want to shine a light on your face, like the surface of the sun. But let’s talk about getting light specifically onto your face. You always want to aim to have light on two sides of the vanity mirror so you can light your face from both directions.
Della Hansmann
If you have one light over the top of the mirror, you’ll cast a shadow on your own face with your nose. So you can try, if you have to mount a light above a pair or a triplicate of sconce lights on the top wall, so they are shedding light from different directions. Or if you’ve got a big solution of mirror for a small bathroom, you can mount pendant lights from the ceiling and let them hang in front of the mirror space, which will double the light you’re seeing. Don’t forget about night lights to start.
Della Hansmann
Put everything on a dimmer. But then even better, you can think about a plug in automatic light that comes on when all the other lights are off. Casper makes a good brand that’s very nice, minimal, little, round, sort of disc light looking thing. And then you can also go one step better by wiring in a light that either comes on automatically from a motion sensor or that you flip on a light switch, but it’s lighting the undersides of something under the kick plate of your cabinets, or, if you’ve got floating vanity cabinets, that’s a really subtle light that prevents you from tripping over anything and doesn’t shine a light up into your eyes in the middle of the night.
Della Hansmann
So ask yourself, Do I have enough actual and enough variety of natural and artificial light right now? How often am I flipping on a light during the day? When do I want mood lighting at night, rather than all of the lights? I see good lighting as one of the key elements of a great mid-century remodel.
Della Hansmann
But if you want five more essential elements of a mid mod bath update, then you can grab them at mid mod midwest.com/bath where I’ve put together a guide of all the things you want to think about in order to do clever space planning and a beautiful, practical setup for your remodel, whether you’re starting from an original mid-century era bath or one that’s been updated so much that you’re kind of starting from scratch one way or another, you want to plan your mid-century bath update just right?
Della Hansmann
So let’s start there. Find more information about the design tip, plus our History feature this week and the transcript of the whole episode at the show notes page. Mid mod midwest.com Slash 1907,
Della Hansmann
all right, today we are talking about how to improve the insulation quality of a mid-century home. And to start with, we should just take stock. How is a mid-century home likely to be on insulation performance? The answer is, mid what’s going on inside the walls of your mid-century house is likely not very well insulated by modern standards, certainly not by the standards of, say, a passive house.
Della Hansmann
And yet, that doesn’t actually mean that it is an energy performance disaster. For example, it might be very well air sealed, even if it’s not very well insulated. And I’ll talk about why that’s happening in a moment. But first, let’s just do a basic visualization of what’s going on around through the walls of a mid-century house. If your house is early mid-century, from late 1940s going up through, say, mid 50s, probably it has a system that works somewhat like this.
Della Hansmann
Two by four walls are holding up whatever’s happening above the ceiling, the roof, perhaps a floor above, if you’ve got a split level from the floor below. And between those two by fours is a cavity. This is where insulation should be, where it would be in a modern house, but where it may or may not be. If there is insulation in that cavity, it is probably rather compressed. It’s of a sort of an iffy quality. It might be kind of squished, and maybe only about one inch thick, rather than the three and a half inch gap that a 2×4, provides.
Della Hansmann
And it may even be asbestos. It’s probably not doing everything it can be. It may also have, if it was perhaps a blown in structure, it’s probably settled down towards the bottom of the cavity. Anytime you end up doing full demolition, you’ll find out what’s happening inside your walls, and you’ll be more in the know about your particular house. On the outer edges of that two by four gap, there is on the inside side, some type of wallboard.
Della Hansmann
Now it’s not what we think of as modern drywall. It’s not sheetrock like you go to the modern lumber yard and pick up for a home improvement project today. It’s probably some sort of pre-manufactured object, and the odds are that it is in an eight foot length, but it might actually be eight foot running horizontally, and it’s only 15 or 18 inches tall. This was the sort of proto drywall sheet format that came out that seemed to be easier to install. But what’s happening on the inside of it is not just mud tape and paint. It’s probably another layer of plaster.
Della Hansmann
And that’s because while building technology experts were trying to come up with new ways to factory, manufacture and standardized building elements, they were still going out to site and being installed by the same crew of people that had been doing it since their whole lives. The people who were hanging drywall in those early days were plaster guys. And so their tendency was if they needed to seal the gap between two elements of pre-manufactured wallboard, they were going to do it with another half inch thick skim coat of plaster.
Della Hansmann
This is why, if you ever tried to hang anything on the wall of your mid-century house and found it very hard to put a nail into compared to any apartment you lived in previous to moving into the mid-century house, it’s plaster, not drywall that you’re trying to stick that nail into Now this actually is good news for the air seal of your house, because those plaster connections really thoroughly sort of fill in all the gaps preventing air from moving in and out of the house.
Della Hansmann
So in my house, for example, I have a very excellent air seal and really relatively poor insulation that I haven’t done anything to address except in the area of my mudroom addition. So you would expect it to be pretty bad at holding its heat or it’s cool. But in fact, this house does a remarkable job, compared to previous places I’ve lived, of keeping its temperature intact until it starts to get really cold outside, because it’s just very well air sealed. If I’ve got all the windows and doors closed, it’s going to hold on to its temperature for quite a while.
Della Hansmann
All right, so the inside edge of a mid-century house, drywall like object, and then plaster on the inner edge. On the outside, you’ve got some sort of fibrous wallboard material. Now this is adding the diaphragm layer. Diaphragm, in this case, being something that spreads across a rectangular space and gives it diagonal strength, so that the whole house, if it’s a bunch of basically rectangles of two by fours, it doesn’t just tip into a whole bunch of trapezoids and fall over sideways.
Della Hansmann
Another thing that adds diaphragmatic strength to your house is the attic, the triangle of a gable roof keeps the house, again, from wanting to tip over to one side or the other. Triangles are stronger than rectangles, but rectangles make up our houses anyway. This sort of fibrous wallboard material does add a little bit of insulation, not a lot, but a medium amount, so it has some value. And then on the outside of that, it. In a typical mid-century house, you’re going to have some sort of wood, probably cedar siding.
Della Hansmann
It’s either cedar panels or cedar boards or board and batten that won’t be giving you your best air seal, or possibly cedar shingles, or maybe asbestos shingles. But again, that outer layer is not going to give you a whole lot of insulation. There are some variations on this common stick framed house, for example, the post and beam houses designed by Cliff may in Harvey Park. We got a really wonderful rundown on these and their history from Adam Stevens in the episode 1103 where we talked about Harvey Park.
Della Hansmann
And if you want to go check out the show notes for that, there’s actually a gorgeous wooden, balsa wood model that Adam has made of these houses how their post and beam structure works, and also how their wall panels work. Their pre-manufactured wall panels came with the inner and outer edges all ready to go, and they had an x bracing system that ran through the middle of them, which thwarts modern efforts to re insulate them. But did offer that cross bracing effect that was really necessary, by the way this is going to get to.
Della Hansmann
One type of after the fact insulation that’s often offered is to drill holes in either the inner edge of a wall or along the outer siding, and then blow in insulation. That specifically does not work in these cross braced panels in Harvey Park. But it doesn’t work particularly well in any cavity wall system, because, in theory, there’s just these vertical channels of air gap if there’s no previous insulation between each stud. But in practice, there’s electrical wiring. There are other little elements. There’s schmutz left by the original builders.
Della Hansmann
There’s perhaps early proto batt insulation, all of which can block the process of blowing proper insulation in. So at the end of the episode, I’ll talk a little bit more about getting into your actual wall panels. But for now, let’s set that to one side. If you’re interested in improving the insulation quality of your house, the first thing I want you to think about is not adding more R value, but actually checking on your air seal.
Della Hansmann
Here’s a metaphor to try to make this easy and obvious. If you’re going to go outside in the cold, you wouldn’t want to just layer sweater over sweater over sweater over a cotton t-shirt. When you stepped outside, you would instantly feel cold as it seeped right in through all those gaps in the yarn, but a moisture wicking layer with a sweater over it, and then a wind break is going to be a very effective way to stay warm outside, especially if you’re moving around.
Della Hansmann
To translate that back into house, the wicking lacer is anything we want to do about moisture control, where we do an air seal barrier. The wind breaker is your air seal, and insulation is the sweater, the R value of the house. Now, you might feel like your house is a sealed container. No rain or snow is getting in. It’s keeping out the pests and the predators, but there are actually lots of little places where air might be moving in and out of your house, and we don’t want that to happen.
Della Hansmann
Not only is it bad for temperature regulation, but it also might be letting in noise and allergens and environmental pollution, all sorts of things that you don’t really want to be moving in and out of your house. If you want air movement, you can open the windows that’s always under your control, but you don’t want air to be moving in and out of your house when the windows and doors are closed.
Della Hansmann
Speaking of which, the trim edge around windows and doors is one of the chief culprits of air leakage, particularly if you’ve had your windows replaced in the intervening years. You might also, if your windows are older, they might be leaking at the window and door frame itself, like where the window or door operates, and that is perhaps, certainly, that’s a place where you would want to think about repairing a window or door before you replace it, or you might think eventually that you need to replace an older window or door because of air leaking issues.
Della Hansmann
To get into the more specific question of whether you should or could replace your mid-century windows, check out episode 1708 for that topic in a more deep dive, but air sealing around your existing windows and doors at the trim is a good move. You might also want to check for air leaks around light fixtures, particularly can lights into the attic and electrical outlets at the corners of walls and ceilings, if there’s any cracking at the basement rim joist and in various connections to the attic.
Della Hansmann
Now this is where a well-built Time Capsule house might actually be doing pretty well on this front because well fitted, original woodwork and thoroughly plastered walls are pretty well air sealed, and then decades of layers of paint can do an even better job of contributing to the overall air seal of a house.
Della Hansmann
One of the first places to look for violations of your air seal, for gaps, for leaks, for holes, is anywhere that remodeling work had been done in the intervening decades since the house was originally built. Now, if you want to check the air seal of your house, you’ll have this tested by means of a blower door test. It does exactly what it sounds like. There’s a blower put at your front door. They blow air in, I think, in, and they measure the force of the blowing to test.
Della Hansmann
You know what? I don’t know the exact details of how a blower door test works, but it works. This is how you measure air seal. Let’s just skip right over that, and I’ll talk to you about how you can probably, in most states, get a free energy audit with assistance from your local municipality, your county or your state, and also companies that perform the services of adding retrofitted insulation offer, often an assessment beforehand that can compete for free with a blower door test, check to check for air leaks.
Della Hansmann
Thermal imaging, which checks for thermal gaps. That’s basically they take an infrared photo of this exterior of the house from every direction, and they look for areas where it’s colder or hotter, as in, thermal energy, is coming out through the walls of the house, and also just do a visual assessment of the house for under insulated areas that last. The visual assessment is probably something that would come up in your home inspection report.
Della Hansmann
And remember, everybody should have a home inspection report relatively current and one that they have looked through of their house, but an average home inspection probably won’t include a blower door test or a thermal imaging scan. So if you’re worried specifically about insulation, you’re going to need to get a little bit more specific. Now, depending on where your house, your mid-century home, is located, you may have a greater or lesser need for overall insulation and a different need.
Della Hansmann
In hot climates, we insulate and shade to keep heat out. In cold climates, we insulate to keep the heat in. And across the continental US, we’re regulating moisture. The standards for various types of insulation in your area will be set by the state, and if you meet your state mandated standards, you’ll be doing pretty well.
Della Hansmann
Certainly if you make changes to a mid-century house you will be improving the standard, the R-value, that you’re aiming towards in various parts of the house because mid-century houses simply didn’t have the same insulation code on hand. There’s no one going to come around and tell you that you must improve the insulation on your house right now, but it is to your advantage for human comfort, for energy efficiency and just for the overall longevity of your house, to improve its insulation.
Della Hansmann
When and where you can in Wisconsin, typical R value requirements would be for your attic to get up into the R-50, sometimes up to R-60 in certain parts of the state, for walls R-13 or R-19, and for floors and crawl spaces, R-30. Now why the difference? Well, heat rises. So you want to be able to prevent hot from coming up through your floors in the summertime in a Wisconsin environment.
Della Hansmann
And you certainly want to prevent heat from leaking out through the hat of the house, out through the ceiling, out through the attic. And then, of course, you’ll lose some amount of temperature in every direction, regardless heat rising through the walls, through the floor, you can still lose heat. There are easier and more complicated ways to improve your overall insulation and every little bit counts.
Della Hansmann
You want to be thoroughly insulated to feel thoroughly comfortable and thoroughly energy efficient, but if you just reduce the sort of most egregious bad actors around your house, you can lower your heating costs and improve your comfort standards. So we’re going to talk today about what are the first things you can do without having to make on, take on a big remodel project, versus what you want to make sure that you’re going to fold in if you do take on a bigger home improvement project at any time in the future, lower hanging fruit, though, is the easy one to go for.
Della Hansmann
So in your typical house, mid-century home with a basement or crawl space and a gable roof, your builder grade house, the very easiest thing that’s going to be tackled first is to improve attic insulation and to improve insulation at the basement or crawl space. This is something you can probably DIY or it’s also something you can hire someone to do without needing to have a major disruption of your whole life, you don’t need to move out of your house.
Della Hansmann
You don’t need to worry about too much dust. It can happen during a normal workday. It will not cause you to have to put all your furniture and storage. You can start from insulating your basement rim joist, which is maybe one of the most DIY friendly projects. You need minimal materials, a caulk gun and just the ability to stand on a stepladder in your basement and go around and get the unfinished inside edge of the rim joist. Then you can go up a few levels.
Della Hansmann
Putting insulation into an attic is a bit more onerous. And regardless of whether you’re going to do this yourself or have someone else do it, you want to make sure that there aren’t any things you want to do to your ceiling. You’re not, well I’m hoping you’re not, planning to add can lights. I’ve talked on the podcast before about how can lights are not my favorite mid-century feature, but if you’re going to do any kind of wiring work or sealing replacement, if you want to make sure you’ve wired in, for example, smoke and carbon monoxide detectors, if you want to put in better venting in your kitchen or your bathroom.
Della Hansmann
Often things that mid-century houses lack. You want to do all of that attic work first, before you come along and fill the entire thing with loose fill insulation, for example, which will make doing later sealing work much more of a pain in your butt. This is a place where, hey, surprise, surprise, a master plan approach is good. If you know all the things you want to do to your house, you might put almost 99% of them onto the back burner and still go ahead and do your insulation projects first, because that’s just efficient and it costs less and it’s going to save your energy bills. But there might be one or two things like adding ventilation systems
Della Hansmann
that you have to do or you would like to do before you come around to those insulation projects. Let’s hit a couple of our other floor and ceiling special cases. If your house is built on a slab, unless you live in sunny California, you may still want to provide some insulation around that area. And I’m not suggesting that you try to insulate underneath the slab. That needs to happen at the time of construction or not at all, but you can pursue what’s known as outsolation.
Della Hansmann
Basically, this means digging a trench away from the house and laying insulation in that creates a gap between the soil protected by the bulk of the house itself, underneath the house, and the soil that’s experiencing any kind of freeze thaw cycle away from the house. It makes a little disruption in your landscaping for a while that can really pay dividends in terms of thermal comfort and keeping your floors more foot friendly temperature.
Della Hansmann
If you are lucky enough to live in a house with a flat roof or with an elevated interior ceiling with exposed beams, for example, you are probably living with however much insulation was put into the roof in the first place, and it’s certainly not up to modern insulation standards. I can literally guarantee it.
Della Hansmann
So if you want to add insulation to a roof, in that case, your best bet is going to be do that at the time that you’re repairing the outer finish of the roof, possibly just replacing it due to UV degradation, or if you have any kind of catastrophic damage, a branch falls on the house or something. This is the time to bite the bullet and add insulation. Now I’m a person who likes to focus on practicality over esthetics, but we don’t have to ignore esthetics entirely.
Della Hansmann
And if you’re lucky enough to be a flat roof person, part of the way that your house looks is the thickness or thinness of the line of the roof edge, if it is very slender, adding insulation is going to change that ratio. One thing you can think about is that you don’t actually need to insulate the roof where it’s not over your house, the soffits don’t need to be insulated.
Della Hansmann
This is a slightly more complicated installation job, but rather than just adding an even thickness over the entire area of roof, you can ask your installer to taper the insulation out to the edges so you can maintain whatever slenderness there was at the outer fascia edge of your roof for a better esthetic result, and then just have a much thicker insulation value over the finished part of the house itself.
Della Hansmann
As we’re talking about replacing roof because of damage, this is probably the time to talk about if you’re going to add insulation to your exterior walls. The easiest time to do that is from the outside, if you have to take on a siding replacement project. And as you know, I’m not a big fan of willy nilly replacing the siding of mid-century houses. In many cases, the original siding is old growth, seed, cedar, redwood. It is beautiful. It is vintage. It is irreplaceable, and it does not belong in a landfill unless something catastrophic has happened to it.
Della Hansmann
But if it has that catastrophe might be damaged from hail. It might just be that the previous owner didn’t paint it properly and it has brought it out over time. You need to come back and replace it with something else when you’re taking off the outer siding layer. This is your easiest way to get at the interior of your walls and add bat insulation or blown insulation into the wall cavity itself.
Della Hansmann
I highly recommend that you invest in going ahead and doing that, rather than just taking off the siding and stopping on new siding without taking the opportunity to insulate. Doing a big siding replacement project is a chance to change a lot of things about your house. So I recommend you think about this really deeply.
Della Hansmann
You might also want to check out Episode 1108 for the episode, what is the perfect mid-century house color, where I talk about siding issues, choices, verticality versus horizontality, various types of materials you might choose. I don’t get into insulation in that episode, but I cover all the other bases you’re going to think about.
Della Hansmann
The last way to add insulation to the walls of your house is to come at them from the inside. And again, this is going to be tied together with a bigger change. But any time you’re making a down to the studs approach towards your house. If you have to get into the bathroom and you need to deal with plumbing issues, and you’re taking out tile and going down to the studs, add insulation to the exterior wall, in a kitchen, in a gut remodel, you’re probably going to get down to the studs.
Della Hansmann
This is an opportunity to add insulation. In any case where you’re doing a major layout shift, moving bedrooms around, shifting walls. You’re coming down to the studs. This is a place where you also want to invest in adding insulation to any place that you have access to. It might even be worth it to be a little bit more disruptive to go into a few more rooms, to add more to the insulation value of your overall house.
Della Hansmann
So the bottom line is that the insulation quality of a mid-century house. House probably does not meet modern code. It certainly does not meet any kind of lead or passive house or particularly energy performance concerned modern standard. But the choice of whether to dig into your walls and get to a place where you can add cavity insulation is always going to be similar to the one of whether it’s right to replace your original mid-century windows.
Della Hansmann
You have to balance the potential energy efficiency you could achieve with the waste that you would generate by throwing a bunch of materials into a landfill and asking for a whole bunch of new materials to be generated and attached to your house. I think the best opportunity is when you’re doing other work, when you have multiple reasons to change the layout, the finished materials or the other functionalities of your house, this is a great time to improve its insulation at the same time and just increase the benefit you’re getting out of it, and that might be your actual lived experience, lowered energy costs, or how you sleep at night, feeling like you’ve made a little contribution to making your house sturdier, better insulated, better maintained, so that it can last for decades to come and generations into the future.
Della Hansmann
If today’s episode was all about strengthening the boundary between in and out, creating better insulation, separation between your inside, conditioned air and your outside, everything else, our mid-century house feature of the week is about the opposite. It’s about blurring the boundary between in and out, because I want to talk about the inside outside planter.
Della Hansmann
Now, a mid-century planter box by the front door can take a couple of different forms, and I will throw a few photographs into the show notes page so you can get an idea of what this might look like if you want to add and emulate it for yourself. But here’s a little simple description. In the Midwest, this often takes the form of a simple brick or stone constructed built in planter rocks near the front door of the house.
Della Hansmann
It might be right adjacent to running along, built into the front wall, or it might be set slightly out from the edge of the house, but built out of the same material as the house is like on the opposite side of an entry sidewalk. It might provide the sort of outer boundary of a front stoop or a sidewalk that approaches the front door.
Della Hansmann
Now in that case, it’ll typically be built in planter designed by the original builder outside the house, but inside the front door there will also be a gesture by the builder, a wall the back of a fireplace, the front of a fireplace, another inside, built in planter made from the same material, the same brick or stone that’s used decoratively. On the outside. There might even be enough glass at the front door that you can stand outside the house, ring the bell and see both pieces at the same time, or maybe there isn’t. And you just carry that concept in your mind.
Della Hansmann
As you walk up, you see a beautiful limestone planter on the outside of the house. And then you walk in the front door, you’re invited in, and you see the repeating motif on the inside. This has you carry the outside in with you, and connects in and out in your mind, in one of the hallmarks of great mid-century design, creating a better flow between inside and outside spaces, a transparent or at least a psychologically boundary transition that carries you through those spaces now in milder climates, California is a great example, there is a tradition of just a glass wall.
Della Hansmann
Sometimes the outer boundary of the house is at the front door. Sometimes it’s set behind a fence. So once you come in the front gate, you’re sort of in the entry courtyard, and then you’ve got materials that happen in and out of the house. There’s also sometimes a tradition in climates like that, or I’ve seen it in a ready to remodel students house in Michigan, which I think this was just borrowing a California idea and perhaps translating it a little, a little temperature riskily, to the house where there’s a glass wall and there is a planting space on the outside of that glass wall, and then on the inside of the house there is a sunken dirt planter, so you could have the same plant material happening.
Della Hansmann
The same sort of Hosta or mother in law, tongue or something happening outside the house and in on both sides of a glass boundary. I think these kinds of sunken gardens inside an entry area are fascinating. They’re fascinating, though, but tricky. It’s not easy to keep plants alive inside of a house. It requires more care, more watering, careful regulation of sunlight and something of a green thumb.
Della Hansmann
It’s not the kind of feature also that can be applied to every house in a development in a suburban tract with equal success. You can’t just put the same thing on the north side and the south side of the street and expect that plants that never get sun will do the same as well as plants that get a lot of hours of direct sunlight every day.
Della Hansmann
So there’s also the problem of a lot of people just don’t want to have dirt next to the floor in their house if they’re not a plant person. So a lot of these built in planters have been filled in, covered over, sometimes carpeted over, usually they put something down into the formerly dirt sunken area. I personally love a planter as a mid-century house design feature, even if they only exist on the outside.
Della Hansmann
And as a person without a green thumb, I want to tell you that even if you have a planter, you’re not obligated to put plants in it. You could put an object in there, clean it out, put in a layer of gravel, and then a tidy, minimalist. Structure also fake plants exist. The bottom line though is that these mid-century house features look cool and they are a lovely way to add back or insert detail that was never there if you’re living in a house that doesn’t have a lot of interesting detail on the outside.
Della Hansmann
Mine, for example, has no brick block or stone, just horizontal wooden siding. If I were going to undertake a bigger construction project to zip up the entry of my house, particularly if I planned to push out any kind of covered roof portico, front porch, air lock, mud room. What which could do a lot to add an interesting roof line to a boring little house like mine or possibly yours.
Della Hansmann
If you’re in this situation, I would absolutely look for a place to tie in a built in planter on the outside, and then something similar on the inside, separating off the entry area from the rest of the living room, perhaps guarding a little bit of weatherproof entry flooring from the living room wood floor beyond. And then I would match the material of that planter, stained cedar, limestone, brick stack, Bond tile.
Della Hansmann
You might think about creating that indoor outdoor connection to improve the in and out flow of your house. So one way or another, bop over to the show notes page and check out some examples of gorgeous mid-century planters that could be used to enhance the style and also the functionality of your entry.
Della Hansmann
Find photos of great mid-century planters and other details of all kinds of mid-century things on my website at mid mod midwest.com the show notes page for today is 1907 remember, anytime you’re thinking about a bigger remodeling project, it is the perfect time to bake in some new or renewed green design features, and I would love to work with you on that.
Della Hansmann
This is something we take into consideration as we do master plan documentation for our clients, but it’s also something we could just chat about. So if you would like to schedule a call to talk about how to make your house more sustainable, you can do that at any time by going to mid mod midwest.com/call and we will talk about greening up or increasing the green factor of your already sustainable, wonderful mid-century home.
Della Hansmann
I’ll be back next week with a special episode about how to use holiday events and just being in your home during holiday times to kickstart or improve your longer, bigger picture mid-century home remodel plans. See you then you.