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Best of Our 25 Days of Design

This week we’re revisiting the best of our 25 days of design in hopes of sparking your sense of wonder about your home, boosting your remodel confidence and providing concrete advice on making your 2023 remodeling dreams come true.  

‘Tis the season! Around the holidays, everyone likes to add a little charm to their home. Shortening daylight makes us think about how to maximize the comfort and joy inside. Bringing out seasonal decorations makes us take a fresh look at the space where we spend our days and share holiday traditions. As well it should – we need a recurring chance to reevaluate how well our homes suit our lives!

This season of revelry and reflection is a great opportunity to dream a little bigger than holiday decor. While you’re thinking about how to make your house merry and bright for the season, let’s also think about how to improve it in the medium and long-term!

In Today’s Episode You’ll Hear:

glowing star I ALREADY LOVE YOUR MCM HOME

Seriously, before I can even get into a pep talk about what you can do to improve on your house … let’s talk about how great it is already. Because mid-century homes, no matter how modest, ARE great.

What’s your favorite thing about your house right now?

snowflake USE THE RULE OF THREE TO MAKE EASY DESIGN CHOICES

Sometimes the biggest challenge in planning updates for your home can be deciding what you like … or if you like an idea enough to pursue it. Use this easy trick to help clarify any decision!

Have you given this one a spin? Say hey in the comments if you’ve ever “goldilocks-ed” your way to a smart choice!

candleWHAT DOES MCM MEAN TO YOU?

Don’t worry that I’m going to tell you that you’ve got it wrong.  I’d never do that.  In fact … whatever you think of as Mid-Century Modern can work for you.  It’s a big tent term.  But to nail down what you like a little more closely … try the handy Style Quiz I created.  It’s right on my homepage or at www.midmod-midwest.com/stylequiz.  Take the quiz and let me know what answer you got!

wrapped gift GIVE THE GIFT OF DESIGN

Is there’s an MCM homeowner on your holiday list that you just can’t buy for?  Why not give them the gift of design? Make their year!  Give them a One Hour MCM Design Consultation with an architect OBSESSED with mid-century design(that’s me)! 

A one hour call could be all you need to get the answers and confidence to move forward on your next home improvement project.  You’ll be amazed at what we can get done in an hour! 

We can:

  • transform your front entry
  • game out an entire exterior update
  • decide on all the materials for a kitchen overhaul
  • firm up a remodel plan for the next year and beyond

… all in a one hour call.  (If you need more help … maybe a Masterplan is for you!)

Schedule your MCM Design Consultation for the new year and let your loved one know what’s coming at gift-opening time.  Or just treat yourself right now!

snowman TEN TIPS TO SAVE BIG MONEY WHEN YOU REMODEL

This is the QUESTION for any homeowner planning an update and I have the answer.

Grab your notebook, because this is going to be good!  We all want to get the most bang for our remodeling buck.  Here is a lighting round good cost-saving ideas to incorporate into your mid-century remodeling plans!

Which one of these feels easiest to you?  Share your own cost saving measures in the comments!

evergreen tree HOW TO SEE BEYOND WHAT YOU HAVE AND IMAGINE YOUR DREAM HOME

We often plan a remodel around what we DON’T like about our house right now. That’s perfectly valid … but a little negative.  Use this thought exercise to go beyond what you have right now and dream up some ways to make your home more than it can be.

pie WHAT PART OF YOUR HOUSE MOST NEEDS AND UPDATE …

… and why is it your kitchen.  Seriously.  As much as I love the look of a mid-century kitchen, their layouts leave a lot to be desired.  Pretty much EVERY SINGLE ONE of my master plan clients needs some help solving the problems of their kitchen layout.

That’s why I’m SO EXCITED to announce that in January I’m going to be sharing all my kitchen update know how with you in a Live Kitchen Update Workshop.  Will you be there?

Resources 

And you can always…

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Read the Full Episode Transcript

Here we are in the midweek of December, also known as right in the middle of, “let’s circle back on that next year” season. For those of you looking to sit back and take your mind off your work life for a minute or follow last week’s advice to use this holiday hosting season to gather home improvement thoughts. Here’s a little bouquet of good planning ideas and concepts. We’ve rounded up the best of last December’s 25 days of design video series for your listening delight.

Hey there. Welcome back to Mid Mod Remodel. This is a 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 season 10, episode 10. Now, there will be resources and great free ideas you can use Sprinkle throughout this episode, so listen in for them as you’re going through and then go find links waiting for you at midmod-midwest/1010. That’s 1010. See you on the flip side.

December 2nd. I already love your home the way it is.

And today actually, rather than talking to you about what you should do to your house, I just wanna tell you why I already love it. Mid-century houses are obviously my passion. Uh, if we haven’t met, hi, I’m Della. I am an architect and a mid-century ranch enthusiast, but I have very good reasons for why I love these little houses so much. And I live personally in the most modest of mid-century ranches. 1952 builder, basic standard picture window out front, simple kitchen. Um, you can see the basic trim that was, I promise, already painted in this room before I painted it again. Um, slab plywood doors just couldn’t be more modest, but it’s a great house. I was delighted on the day that I bought it. Um, it just really fills me with joy because all of these builder grade mid-century ranchers that were built in by the literal millions, um, between the 1940s and the 1960s across the US have a bunch of things going for them.

So I just wanna tell you some wonderful things about the house you live in right now. If you live in a mid-century ranch, it is a perfect size. Maybe you think it’s a little small, maybe it’s actually generous compared to the last apartment you lived in. But a mid-century ranch is a good size of single-family home. Um, we’ll talk about density and another time. Basically, they were built to ma to meet the necessities of modern life, but not to be extravagant. They’re not your modern McMansion. They’re not gonna be filled with extra rooms for things you don’t do. And if you plan them right, if you design around their quirks, they can have space for everything you could possibly want. One of the reasons they don’t need to be super large is because mid-century houses were built in mid-century neighborhoods. They’re close to a lot of wonderful things.

They’re right in the middle of schools, churches, libraries, parks. Usually you can walk to shopping sometimes. We used to have a grocery store in the little development across the block from mine, and now that’s moved a few miles away. But there are so many accessible things in a mid-century neighborhood, including a whole bunch of other mid-century houses. So you can walk out the door of your home and admire the charming features of everyone else’s mid-century home. And these little houses are so well built. They were made with care by maybe the last generation of real craftsman contractors out of materials that you can’t get your hands on today in some cases. Most of the ranches in my neighborhood have really modest, um, cedar siding. It looks very basic, but actually it’s redwood. It is like old growth. You can’t put that on the house. Siding of a modest builder grade house these days.

What you get now is vinyl. Likewise, the floor joist that hold these up, the basic oak wood floor that you’ve got down here, um, oh, it’s a little grungy. Don’t judge me. Um, also my chair is squeaking. It’s happening. Happy December. Uh, it’s dry in here. This floor would be, it’s basically unattainable today. It’s irreplaceable today. You can put in a wood floor, a hardwood floor, but it won’t be as dense as thick as this. It won’t be such old growth. These are just materials we don’t have access to anymore. And so to maintain them, to take care of them, to love and appreciate them, that is our charge. As mid-century homeowners, these little houses are so livable and lovable. They have really comfortable features. They’re easy to render accessible. As people age in place, one of my neighbors down the block just put a ramp out so they can go down their two steps to the driveway more simply.

But these are houses that suit a single person, a family, quite a large family back in the day, people raised families of six in these three bedroom ranches. Um, and then you can age and place in them. They’re so wonderful and if you need to expand, they’re incredibly easy to add onto. They were built that way. The simple gable roof that a lot of the Midwestern ranches have can basically be just like put on an L a c a Z. Any shape of pushout addition you want can be added with simple structure with minimal cost for footings and foundations. They’re practical for just about any kind of addition because they’re so well built and simple in form. The sort of more fancy, complicated shapes of houses that I saw going up by the, I can’t even imagine how many in cornfields all over the northern Chicago suburbs when I was growing up.

Those houses are much harder to modify because they have more complicated shapes. Simple little rectangle ranch that was built just constantly in the era that our houses were built. That is really easy to put an addition on. So if you’re curious about that, I have a lot of other material. Ask a question in the comments and we’ll talk more about additions and later in this month. And then finally, mid-century ranches have charm. It doesn’t matter how basic they are, there’s something to love for me. I fell in love with this house because of the doors, the wood grain and the stain is just so beautiful. It’s really nice to the touch too. And I have a cute little telephone nook by my, uh, dining space to connect to the kitchen. I don’t keep a telephone in there. I keep library books in it, but it’s, it’s just making me smile every day when I go by.

So if you have something you love, some simple modest little feature of your mid-century house that you’d like to share, drop a comment. I would love to hear about it. I will celebrate it with you. But today I just wanted to say the best thing you can do for your house today to think about how you can improve it is to appreciate it. Think about what a great house you live in. Your mid-century ranch is wonderful, almost just as it is. We’ll talk about what you can do to tweak it later in the month. Happy December 2nd.

December 6th. Use the rule of three to simplify all of your home design decisions.

Today I wanna teach you a simple trick that can make any design decision go more easily. Are you ready? It’s as simple as the fable of Goldilocks in the three bears. It’s always easier to make a decision when you have three options, basically like Goldilocks. You can find that one is too much, one is too little, and one is just right, or the other alternatives also occur. Sometimes two excessive possibilities. Make a one simple one feel totally rational and reasonable. Or two, two small choices for a really important part of your house. Let you lean into the big choice and dial it back somewhere else. One of the hardest things about a home remodel process can be that you call the shots, which feels like a win, but actually just means you have to make all the decisions at the end of the day, you have to live with them.

Some people really struggle with uncertainty and even myself as a designer, sometimes I have a hard time knowing which is the right option to suggest to my clients. But while I want to give them some possibilities, I don’t want to give them too much. So to avoid their design overload, I always give three possibilities for any kitchen remodel, addition, basement layout change. If we’re gonna be doing something complicated to the house, I wanna workshop three good possibilities and then organize them into least middle and most, then they can be weighed against each other and the pros and cons can really start to come to the fore. If you look at your home and you feel like there’s only one thing you can do to it, I guarantee there are a couple of other possibilities and you need to keep searching until you find them, even if all that does is give you confidence and certainty that your first choice was the best.

Likewise, when you’re taking in contractor bids, don’t take the first contractor you first talk to, no matter how good they make you feel. You wanna have two alternatives so you can compare prices, see that you’ve got apples to apples, and again, you might have a great relationship with the first person you talk to and that might be your final choice. Or you could find out that the next person you talk to comes off even better. Either way, your final choice will be more confident, more calm, and more concrete if you’ve waited against two other possibilities. I use three a lot in my business. Three levels of home remodeling, three factors. Um, for what makes a good design, it needs to be the vitruvian triad. Beautiful, useful and strong. But one of my favorite uses of the number three is just to look at three possibilities for any design challenge. And in the end, I find that that makes me, let’s say three times as confident that we’ve done the right thing. If you have an experience with having struggled between two design alternatives or feeling uncertain about one, have you ever given three options a try? Let me know when the comments, I’d love to hear about it

December 9th. What does mid-century modern mean to you?

What do the words mid-century design mean to you? Now, before you tense up and think, oh no, is Della about to tell me that what I think is mid-century modern is wrong? I would never do that. In fact, I’m gonna do the opposite. I want to just encourage you to think that whatever your personal path through the forest of mid-century design is, is right for you. It’s a big tent topic. There are a lot of different eras and years encompassed within the term mid-century modern. Um, and it can mean a lot of different things. For example, um, one of my employees, Lucille told a story on our TA chat thread this weekend that she was listening to her kids talk in the other room and the older ones said to the younger, it’s time for us to get dressed up. Let’s put on our mid-century clothes.

And the younger ones said, yes, our mid mod clothes. And she had no idea what they could mean by that. They don’t have a vintage dress up box. So she went in the next room and found that they’d put on their animal themed onesies, a unicorn and a lion, and they felt super stylish. In fact, then they said they had dressed for success a term she didn’t think she’d ever said around them. But I know she says the words mid-century and mid mod around them a lot because she works from home and she works for me. So I think that story is the best because basically it just means that her kids have learned to use the words mid-century modern to mean a very spiffy thing that I like. And that’s kind of how I see it too. The term mid-century modern, I think I’ve read, it’s was first traced actually in the eighties, a vintage furniture dealer who was trying to find a catchy name to put on a gathering of things she was starting to accumulate from estate sales and resale and wanted to market to people, but it didn’t have, it was basically just considered old and out of style in the eighties.

She said, well, let’s call it mid-century modern. And it really caught on. I have since learning that story, also seen the term mid-century modern used by a contemporary furniture dealer in England in the mid fifties. But I don’t think it really caught on it as a term then in the era that we all love the stuff of, they weren’t calling it mid-century modern, they were just calling it contemporary modern current today new. So we can mean a lot of different things. We could mean something very vintage cottagey, almost from the forties, right during the war or all the way into sort of mod bordering on the seventies part of the sixties when things are really starting to get plastic and space age. All of those things fall under the heading of mid-century design. Not to mention we bring in international modernism styles and we’ve got what mid-century meant here in America, what it meant in Europe, in s Scandinavia versus England, what it might have meant in Japan, what it meant in South and Central America.

There’s a bunch of specifics that can be pulled in to create so many different variations on the style. I do think though, that as you develop plans for your home, for your life, for the furniture, you wanna accumulate the color choices you’re gonna make the material and finished choices that you make as you go through your remodel process. You wanna have a pretty clear idea of what it does mean to you, which is why I asked that question at the beginning. And if you’re struggling with that question and you wanna have some help to figure out where in the broader category of mid-century modern you fall, then I’d love for you to take my easy style quiz. You can go to mid mod midwest.com/style quiz to take a probably 32nd quiz just showing you pictures and telling you things that you might like or respond to.

Pick the things that resonate with you. There’s no right or wrong answer, and you’ll get a, you’ll get a specially generated style guide that will take you to a broad spectrum of what type of things you might like and you might fall really towards the traditional, the early end vintage time capsule, pure mid-century modern. You wanna find a house that’s never been touched, take out anything that’s been done that’s a historical and really make it feel like you’re living the dream in 1952. Or you might fall totally on the other end. You like everything contemporary, modern, you actually live in a loft, but you have a few pieces of mid-century architect designed furniture that really make your heart sing. You fall into the camp too, or you might be somewhere in the middle in a sort of a fusion area where you love some of the aspects of mid-century era design, but you also wanna bring in some modern kitchen layout, um, some fresh materials that might not have been available in that era.

You’re not wild about some of the, um, specifics of layout style lighting that you found in an original mid-century house and you wanna bring it up to date in a friendly way to its era. All of these are good answers and what matters most is that you know what’s the right choice for you. So go to mid mod midwest.com and take the quiz, then come on back and put your answer in the comments. If you’ve already taken it, let me know where you fall on the spectrum. I’m fascinated to find out and I will comment back with my answer if you tell me yours. So let me know where you fall. I might come back and talk about this on a couple more days, but just remember that when you put on your mid mod clothes, your mid-century clothes, it can be a unicorn onesie and that’s just fine. Whatever, whatever you like. If you like mid-century modern, we’ll find a way to make it work inside the big broad tent.

December 14th. Give the gift of design this year.

The best way I know to solve a design challenge is to get a second opinion. So I’m gonna take a pause this day on talking about generalized design ideas and suggest that if we are ticking down towards Christmas and the mid-century home loan we’re on, your list hasn’t yet been gotten a gift, why don’t you give them the gift of design? Seriously, a one hour design consultation with a mid-century obsessed architect like myself could be the gift that makes their entire year and sets your remodeling plans on track. In past one hour calls, I’ve helped people transform their front entry game out, an entire exterior update, including new windows, replacement siding, front door update, gutters roof, and the lurk, the works. Um, I’ve helped people to take the plans for a previous owner’s kitchen remodel that had really high end choices that did not suit the new owner and figure out what exactly they needed to change in order to get the best results from not destroying too much of the previous owner’s work and paying for it all over again.

I’ve helped choose all the materials for a high end and a medium end kitchen update and firm a plans for the entirety of the next year. What should come first? Next, last, be done together. It is always a blast to get to peek inside of someone’s mid-century home and to get to share with them my expertise on sustainability in remodeling, on what order to take things in, on how to ask for expert help from other contractor sources and suppliers who to go through first and how to weigh the values of different design choices against each other. There are no supply line challenges with a consult call with mid Mod Midwest. So I also wanted to take this moment to let you know that because these calls are so great and so popular, I’m gonna be raising the price in the new year. So sign up now for your last chance to get a one hour design consult on your house for just $250. If this sounds like a gift you’d like to give or like a gift you’d like to suggest someone else give to you, you can go check out the website, mid mod midwest.com/services to check out our work with us page. I’ll put a link in the notes before this or you can just save this video or forward it to the person who needs to see it. I hope I’ll be chatting with you about your home in the new year. I’m really looking forward to it.

December 17th, 10 tips to save big money when you remodel.

Here are 10 ways to cut costs dramatically on your home remodel. Are you ready? You’re gonna wanna take notes. Number one, do it yourself. If all you’re paying for is the materials and the objects you’re attaching to the house, not the time and expertise of people doing the work, you will save buco bucks. Of course, you will pay the cost in your own time and energy, but that’s not dollars. So that’s not what we’re talking about. If you do need outside expertise or just even another person to help you heavy lift, ask for help. Ask a friend to come over and help you move heavy objects and offer to trade professional services with an expert who can do things. You can’t. Your graphic design skills for their electrical expertise, for example, three is to try to keep costs slow in the rest of your life while you remodel.

If you’re remodeling a kitchen, one of the most common home upgrades, build a temporary kitchen in your basement. Make sure you’ve got access to water so you can wash dishes, pull a microwave down there, maybe even move the stove down so that you don’t end up subsisting on takeout and spending a lot of monies on taking a trip to a hotel to shower while you’ve got things out of control. This also applies to doing sort of one parts of the house at a time if you’re planning to live in the house. So you’re only decommissioning one bathroom rather than gutting all of the plumbing and going forward. Tip four is to be flexible with your product selection. Wait for sales before you make a big purchase. This helps to have a long planning window so if you know what’s coming ahead, you can jump on a Black Friday or a President’s Day sale and get appliances that are exactly the same product that you would’ve gotten for full price at deep discount markdown.

Or you can look for slightly nest nice products at a scratch and dent sale. If you’re gonna be building in carefully around your refrigerator, what do you care if it’s got a big gash down the side, you can get a discount for that, do it. Or look for secondhand objects. Scour your local, restore Facebook marketplace, Craigslist, Etsy to find things that have been used by someone else but now will be the perfect choice for your home. This works great for us vintage lovers because sometimes pre used objects are the best ones for a mid-century house. And number five is to then think about what’s valuable in the house that doesn’t work for you but might for someone else and make it available for them to reuse. Sell your unwanted furniture, trim appliances, fixtures, light fixtures on Craigslist, Facebook Marketplace place and see if somebody else wants to make cash out of what you don’t want in your house.

This will also keep it out of the landfill. Bonus points for sustainability. Okay, number six is how to pay for it. You can use a rewards credit card, but pay with cash you already saved. By far. The cheapest way to finance a remodel is to save for it in advance and never have to pay interest on it, but it can be a really Ben benefit to get DA major discounts or signing bonuses for a credit card. So the best plan to finance a remodel with a credit card is to have the money saved in advance and just get an extra discount cash back, if you will, from your credit card, rather than signing up for Home Depot card and then spending yourself finding yourself paying for your remodel 10 years after it was done in interest.

Alright, tip seven, work with what you’ve got while tweaking your house, not making huge changes. The smaller the changes you make, the more subtle they are, the less expensive. Now, this doesn’t mean you can’t have a dramatic effect, but for example, what you wanna do is keep plumbing hookups and openings in the same spot that they were originally, rather than moving everything around. Anything that already works in your house should stay.

The next cost saving step is to stick to your original footprint. If you make no changes to the building envelope whatsoever, no additions, no new openings, no new holes, you will have a less expensive remodel. You don’t need to build new roof, you don’t need to pour new foundations. Everything that happens within the four or more walls of your house is cheaper than pushing outside of that envelope.

Or nine. If you want to make an addition, make that addition as effectively as cost effectively as possible by keeping it really simple, a simple rectangular form and as little electrical and plumbing in it as necessary.

For example, if you wanted to live a life that has a wonderful big kitchen that opens up into a play space, one way you might do that is to put a kitchen addition on the back of your house. But another way to do it is to keep your existing kitchen in its current footprint, same plumbing opening and bust. Open the wall next to it to connect with a big new edition that goes off to the side. But if that addition is as simple as possible, four walls, roof, foundation, windows, electrical outlets as needed, but no plumbing, it will be a lot less expensive to build.

Alright, and then number 10, this one’s for all the marbles. Plan your work and stick to that plan. This is why I tell people to have master plans. The most expensive thing you can do in a remodel is change your mind in midstream or worst after you’re done and have to redo something. So the better your plan is in advance, the more firmly you follow it as you go through, the more you will save money. Alright, I hope this has given you some new ideas. Put your favorite money saving tips for a renovation in the comments. I look forward to seeing if you can tell me something I didn’t already know.

December 20th, how to see beyond what you have and imagine your dream home.

Are you traveling this holiday season? I wanna teach you how you can use that to help brainstorm a perfect remodel for your house, even if you’re not having the chance to go anywhere. Wonderful. Right now we can take a little trip in your mind. Today I’m sharing with you one of the design exercises I use inside the ready to remodel program to help people really think outside the box of their remodel. Too often when we’re planning remodel ideas for our house, it comes out to things we don’t like. This is tired and worn out. This bothers me, so I want to fix it. And while there’s absolutely nothing wrong with fixing things you don’t like about your house when you remodel, it’s even better to come from a place of positivity. What do I wish my house did have that it doesn’t? What do I wish my life could be that it isn’t right now?

And it’s hard to think about those things objectively when you’re sitting inside a house that exists. So one of the best ways I know is to use your favorite vacations or places of the past to inform what you wanna do to make your house everything it can be right now. Here’s how it works. Think about one of your favorite places to be. It might be where you’re going on vacation for these holidays. It might be your grandparents’ house when you were a child or the library on your campus when you lived in freshman year on campus housing. Doesn’t matter where it is. What you need to do is conjure up that space. If you’re traveling to it right now, you can do it even more easily in ctu. Think about though, not just what it looks like but what it feels like. Is it big or small?

Is the surface that you experience? Are you sitting on something large or small? Is it about being cozy or exalted? Is it about convenience? Here are a couple of examples. So a lot of people love the experience of living in an Airbnb when they’re on vacation. Part of what’s fun of that is just the newness or the fun design features that might be involved there, but part of it can actually be the simplicity in getting out the door. You wake up, you sit up, the bathroom is right there, then you go over, there’s a coffee maker and you get your morning coffee ready to go. You pull on your outside clothes and boom, you’re out the door. If you love that experience of travel, you can think about how to simplify and streamline your getting, waking up to out the door processes at home. For example, maybe you want a coffee station, not just in your kitchen, but in your master suite.

Would that transform your life? Would that make every day feel like a vacation? If not, then don’t worry about that idea. But perhaps that’s the way to make every day more luxurious for you. Or maybe what you love is a house that you can really see the sky from. A lot of people remember staying in sort of inconvenience spaces, sleeping on the floor at a grandparent’s house or tucked into an attic under the eaves. Sometimes we have unusual views in those spots. And so if you love the idea of waking up looking at the night sky or seeing the sunrise, how can you reorient your existing sleeping space cut in new window openings, turn the direction that your bed faces so that you have that experience of being able to see the sky easiest way a skylight. And that can be a bit of an investment if you’re not planning to remodel the bedroom area at all.

But couldn’t it be magical? So use these ideas and more to think about what’s your favorite place you’ve been in Europe or down the block at your neighbor’s house that you love the most. And not just how can you make your house look like that, but how can you make it feel like that? How can you recreate that space? And that is the magic of the dream phase of planning remodel, because it’s not just about checklists and utilities and costs, it’s about opening up the possibilities. We’ll get to the practicalities later, but before you can have a great remodel done, you need to dream it up. What makes a great remodel for you? So let me know when the comments, are you going somewhere wonderful? And are you planning to borrow its ideas for your home? If you’re going from winter to a Palm Springs beach vacation or poolside rather, of course there’s no beach in Palm Springs, then you might not be able to create that sense right away. But perhaps you can think about how to bring home the color schemes of Palm Springs into your house. What are you gonna bring home from your next vacation? Actual or mental? I’m very excited to hear what’s gonna turn your house around for you.

December 23rd, all your kitchen problems solved next year.

What part of your house most needs an update and why is it the kitchen? Seriously, this is the part of the house that I address in just about every single master plan project. While homeowners have a lot of different needs and houses have a lot of different histories that cause us to need to work on an owner’s suite or not update a basement or not think about an addition or not, we always work in the kitchen. The only exceptions of that rule are houses which have a recently renovated kitchen. But frankly, even then, we sometimes give them a look. And here’s why many remodels don’t address the layout challenges in a space. They only replace the finishes and fixtures. And when you do that, you preserve all of the original challenges inherent in a mid-century kitchen. You know how much I love mid-century houses, but kitchen philosophy from that time is wildly different from what we want and need out of our kitchens today.

I’ve actually done an entire season of the Mid Modern Model podcast on this, so check that out if you wanna know more. But I also wanna tease something that’s happening in the new year. In January, I’m going to be giving a live workshop where I share all the secrets for how you can fix the layout problems in your mid-century kitchen. Because believe me, I have seen it all from galley kitchens that are almost too small to turn around in to large vault ceiling kitchens that are actually just too big to be comfortable in. I have a lot of problem solving, and we’ll take it a little bit farther than just there are these types of kitchens, a straight line kitchen, an L-shaped kitchen, a U-shape kitchen, or one with an island. Let’s talk about the challenges that you find in your kitchen. For example, cabinets and work services that all face walls, if you’re lucky, you’ve got a kitchen sink window, but probably any other prep surface you’re working at.

You’ve got your face 10 inches from a wall mounted cabinet and your back to anyone that’s in the room with you. You’ve got an overhaul light in the center of the room that casts a shadow with your body on whatever you’re trying to get done. You have a closed in feeling from too many wall cabinets that it’s actually hard to get things out of the top of anyway. And at the same time as you feel closed in, you’re in the center of traffic because most mid-century kitchens have too many doors. Mine has four in a very small space. So I have floor plan solutions for these. These, I have elevation solutions for these. I have so many thoughts on mid-century kitchens I love to share, and I’m going to be sharing all of it in a live workshop where I walk you through examples, take you through specific reasoning and use some of those wonderful Goldilocks, medium, small, medium, large solutions for how I’ve proposed possibilities for other people’s kitchens.

Believe me, there’s one way to fix your kitchen and there’s actually more than one way to fix your kitchen. I’d love to talk about it. So this is just a little bit tease of what we’ll be talking about come January, but right now, I’d love to hear if you have any questions. What is the biggest layout challenge of your mid-century kitchen? Share it in the comments and start dreaming now about how you can plan changes, updates, whether they be small and surgical or grand and totally renovating to your kitchen in 2022. I’m really excited to talk about it with you.

Okay, here’s me talking to you from the end of 2022. Again, I’ll be honest, I am beyond excited to be repricing the kitchen workshop we did last year. It was one of the most fun live online events we did all year long, and I’m thrilled to do it again. So thrilled that I’m gonna completely blow off the carefully made plan. I cooked up with Rebecca Mid Mod Midwest’s wonderful operations lead that we would tell you about this now and then post a wait list link to gauge your interest. I don’t need to gauge your interest. I know you’re excited too. Why not just let you be excited?

So go ahead and sign up for the Kitchen Clinic right now because I’m about to go make the registration page live. I can’t wait to see you in January. Oh, there it is. Sign up now and we’ll circle back on this in the new year, except I think we’ll both be thinking about it for the entire intervening month. I will see you next week. We’re on the podcast. We’re gonna be talking about how to make the end of the year feelings that we all are having and the New Year’s start energy that’s beginning to build up and use that to its best advantage. So I’ll see you then. And in the meantime, I wish you comfort and joy in this short day season.

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