Creating a great vision for your remodel is the goal of everything I do for my clients and with my students. But it actually will only take a mid-century remodel so far.
If that vision lives only in my mind, I can’t share it with my clients.
If that vision only exists in your head, you can share it with anyone who’ll be helping you make your remodel a reality.
So clearly documenting what you’ve designed is a key element to bringing a remodel to fruition.
I could have called the last stage of the master plan method Document. But I didn’t. I called it Develop.
And that’s because your vision is subject to change until the last bit of construction dust has been cleaned away.
You may break your project into phases and learn something about yourself in the first phase that you apply to the second. You may need to adjust your budget along the way. You discover something hidden behind the walls that means you and your contractor need to shift the plan a bit.
And that’s ok.
A good master plan is design to develop through your construction process.
The last three weeks have been a fast flyover of my major design philosophy, which is that mid-century homes should be remodeled with plans created according to the mid-century master plan method.
Which is that to make great choices for a mid-century home you need to follow the status of the mid-century master plan method.
Each of these steps is essential to calibrating your choices to fit your life to fit your budget to align with your house to avoid trend the options that are floating around and being suggested as default by suppliers, sales people, and contractors right now and ultimately to come up with a concept for a remodel, but it’s going to be worth the time of money and energy you will invest in it.
But all of that thinking will only take you so far if you don’t have a good way to share what you’ve decided with all the people that are going to help you make it happen.
You need clear documentation.
And you also need flexibility, because no remodel I’ve ever experienced has gone perfectly to plan. You’re gonna hit unexpected snags in the house new obstacles, or options will be provided to you by your circumstances and team, you may need to reevaluate the budget or you’re available life energy midway along way.
And this is where the final step of the master method shines, the five D’s: Dream, Discover, Distill, Draft, and at the last Develop all work together.
And to develop your master plan, doesn’t mean you’ve carved into a stone tablet, it means you got a document that you can work with and develop throughout the process. It’s gonna keep you on track and on task but in the best way you meet your circumstances where they are.
A lot of of the final choices you’re gonna make around your house will be driven by the budget. I’ve never had a client had any price point who didn’t feel somewhat motivated by the bottom line cost of their remodel.
So you’re not alone and wanting to make sure that you’re spending your money on the right place, that you know what things are gonna cost, and sometimes you need to make compromises of certain choices in order to allow for others.
So let’s talk about why you need more than just a floor plan for success.
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Read the Full Episode Transcript
So a vision for your remodel is the goal of everything I do for my clients and with my students. But actually it will only take a mid-century remodel so far, because if that vision lives only in my mind, I can’t share it with my clients. And if your vision is only in your head, you can’t share it with anyone who will be helping you make your remodel a reality.
So I could have called the last stage of my master plan method document that is a key element of bringing a remodel to fruition, but I didn’t. I named it develop, and that’s because your vision is still subject to change until the last bit of construction dust has been cleaned. That’s okay. A good master plan is designed to develop through your construction process. Let’s talk about that.
Hey there. Welcome back to mid mob 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 2123 okay, I’m still in my July is off from podcast creation month, and I’m still providing you with podcast content, because I had so much fun pulling together these deep dive episodes from the archives. If you’re still looking for more, please feel free to go back. We’ve got over 250 episodes of mid mod remodel ready for you to get expertise and inspiration, but this last pairing, I think, is going to be really helpful.
The last three weeks have been a fast flyover of my major design philosophy, which is that mid-century homes should be remodeled with plans created according to the mid-century Master Plan method.
Now that helps you make great choices for your home and for yourself. It is essential to follow each of these steps, to calibrate your choices, to fit your life, to fit your budget, to align with the house that you have to avoid the trends that are floating around and being suggested as defaults by suppliers, sales people and contractors right now, and ultimately, to come up with a concept for a remodel that is perfectly suited to your life, that’s going to be worth the time, the money and the Energy you invest in it, but all of that thinking will only take you so far.
If you don’t have a good way to share what you’ve decided with all the people who are going to help you make it happen. You need clear documentation, and you also need flexibility, because every remodel I’ve ever experienced has gone a little differently than planned. You’re going to hit unexpected snags in the house, new obstacles or options will be provided to you by your circumstances and by the team that you work with who may have creative suggestions you’ll need to be able to reevaluate your budget or even your available life energy midway along the way. So this is where the final step of the master plan method shines. The five stages as you recall, are dream, discover, distill draft and the last one, develop. They all work together.
And to develop your master plan means that it’s not carved into a stone tablet. It means you’ve got a document that you can work with and continue to develop throughout the process, which will keep you on track and on task, but help you meet your circumstances where you are. A lot of the final choices you make around your house will be driven by budget. I’ve never had a client at any price point who didn’t feel somewhat motivated by the bottom line of their remodel.
So you’re not alone in wanting to make sure that you’re spending your money in the right places and that you know what things are going to cost as much as possible in advance, but sometimes you will need to make compromises of certain choices to allow for others. So this pair of episodes is going to give you some of the most important elements of the develop phase. Let’s talk about why a master plan will bring it all together for you.
And then I am going to share with you my favorite remodel planning spreadsheets, things that I use myself when I’m planning for my own remodel, things that I’ve used on behalf of my custom and master plan clients, and that I share inside of ready to remodel. I think these are going to help you roll with the situation and meet your remodel where it is and where you are for the best possible outcome for your mid-century home and your family enjoy. You’re going to find the links to these two original episodes, plus images, some suggestions about how to set up those spreadsheets and more on the show notes page that will be mid mod midwest.com/2123.
All right, there you go. So how do you get a remodel that perfectly suits your home and balances good bones, good layout and good looks? For a great design, you do it with a master plan. We’ve been digging into a bunch of the different component parts of planning a great kitchen remodel, some history layout challenges you’ll face, the building code and regulation issues that’ll come up and what you want it to look like. All of these are important. But today we’re going to pull back and look at the bigger picture of planning a remodel.
At some point, you’re going to need to bring all of those pieces together to create a plan. And here’s why, a good kitchen requires all of those things in balance. It comes back to a Venn diagram I laid out in season one, which breaks down the elements of good design into three parts, durable, useful and beautiful. This. Actually goes all the way back to Roman architectural philosopher Vitruvius.
He coined what’s now known as the Vitruvian triad, that good architecture must reflect the synthesis of fermatas, utilitas and venustas. You’ll find it written on T shirts in architecture schools as firmness commodity and delight, and for our purposes, it basically just means, is it strong? Does it work, and is it pretty good bones, good layout and good looks. It comes down to these basic things. The building code helps us stay on track with adorable so does getting familiar with the house that you have, you can’t have a great remodel that ignores basic maintenance issues. A beautiful, brand new kitchen with a broken hot water heater is not going to make you happy, nor is one that sags in the middle. But practicality alone won’t make a happy homeowner.
The kitchen also needs to work for your life. It needs to have a convenient pathway for groceries and supplies to come in, be stored, accessed, used and then consumed. It needs to have good flow with the rest of the house, and it needs to work specifically for the people in your family who use it every day, that means thinking about the personal elements of what you’d like from your kitchen. That brings us to the beautiful, the most functional and sturdy kitchen in the world will still not make you happy if it isn’t also lovely.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but for us MCM fans, that probably means lovely, mid-century friendly materials, a pop color of your favorite tile in the backsplash, glowing wood grain in the cabinets, plenty of natural light and a coherence of material that ties the whole room together, both within itself and with the rest of the house. To plan a great remodel, you need to make sure that we’re balancing each of those elements. If you missed that original episode, go back and give it a listen. You can find it at mid mod midwest.com/ 105, or just by scrolling back through your podcast app to season one, episode five.
And if you haven’t checked out the previous seasons, do give them a listen. I’ve been talking about the same basic principles of building design since the beginning, and I stand by everything I’ve said. So moving forward, how do you get a remodel that perfectly suits your home and balances the good bones, good layout and good looks for great design, a master plan, of course, this, you know, if you heard anything I’ve said before, all the items we’ve talked about so far in the season have to come together, and you, as the homeowner and the driver of this remodel bus, need to boil them down into a guide that you can commit to budget for and stick to through the complexities of getting into the remodel. Today we’re going to talk about how to make that happen successfully.
First, though, is there a right time to make a master plan and the planning process? I would argue not. It’s kind of a living document. It’s best to start with a rough outline of your master plan when you first begin dreaming of your future home update, and then slowly it will come into focus. You’ll feed and fill it in with various new opinions, facts and hopes that you find along your research process. But in the end, you’ll want to lock it down fairly firmly before you break ground or drywall on your project.
For the entire process, it’ll be coming together, growing organically out of the other steps, which is why I’ve waited until now to bring it up. You’ll use a master plan for all sorts of parts of the process, your own planning to keep yourself sort of in line as you balance different elements of what you’d like to do in your house, for expanding and refining your ideas. Sometimes, if you’re taking a long time to plan a process, which I do recommend, you may actually forget good ideas you had in the past if you hadn’t captured and recorded them. You can use it for showing off or sharing your plans with friends and family, and from getting buy in from experts as you go along. If you stop by a supply house or happen to consult with a plumber, you can use it once you get pretty close, for sharing with the building department to make sure that it’s going to get permission, and for getting pricing and generally communicating with your subcontractors and builders.
Finally, you’ll use the master plan to keep your whole remodel on track as it starts to take place, and make sure that things that come up during the process don’t tip you off, to make the eventual process look or cost different from what you expected. A good, solid master plan for a remodel should include a couple of features. One, it should start with a clear statement of the house you have its features problems and vital statistics. Two, it should have a vision of the general overarching style of your remodeling goals. And that might just say mid-century modern, or you might define it more clearly that you have a more vintage mid-century approach, or you really like mid-century with a Scandinavian inflected flavor.
So knowing that about yourself and being able to communicate it clearly will be essential in making sure that the ultimate product is what you want. Then you can expand on that sort of simple statement, that overall name for your style with a personalized mood board, or ideally, a style guide. And I’ve talked in the past of how to put together a style guide for your project that will lay out a lot of the little pieces, the inspiration, the materiality, the colors that you’re going to use to pull together the project.
You can break that down even more specifically into a list of the details. And specific materials, design ideas and products that will add up to the overall style. You also want to talk about the major areas are going to be approaching if you’re just remodeling the kitchen that might include things like it will have a mudroom component. It will have a cook component, prep component, and it will have sort of a Hangout eat in space for a whole house.
You might master plan out that you’re going to be working on a kitchen remodel, adding a master suite, updating the basement and overhauling the front door, knowing those general areas and then breaking those down with little descriptions so you know exactly what’s going on, will help you balance the various costs and timing priorities of a bigger project.
You do need a floor plan, although it’s funny that, as an architect, I actually think of this almost last the floor plan will help you visualize the process, and you can augment that with little detail sketches or views. If you’re using a modeling program, you might use SketchUp, for example, or some other more packaged house visualizer to help you pull together the parts and the way that they will move together, the space between cabinets, whether you’re building full height or partition walls between spaces, but basically, having any kind of floor plan of the house, even a rough sketch on eight and a half by 11, will help you do better than if you’re simply trying to describe your goals to the people you’ll be working with.
And one last thing I like to include in a master plan is some sort of motto or guideline, an overall view to keep yourself on track, motivated and focused on the things that were most important to you at the start. That, of course, again, can change if your views change during the part of the process, but keeping that connection back to who you were at the beginning and what you were trying to get out of it is really useful, because it’s easy to lose sight of the big picture when you get into the weeds of a remodel.
Speaking of that big picture, I need to do a little bit of tough talk. Everyone has big plans when they plan a remodel, and it always ends up taking longer and costing more than you. Hope it’s unfortunate, but I would rather say this to you now than spin a pie in the sky. Hope that everything can be accomplished, especially in this post COVID building or during COVID building crunch in the timing and for the price that you were hoping.
But that said, I really do believe that planning, having a master plan, having a list of what your goals are, being able to prioritize them will help you get the remodel you want for the budget and time that you’ve got available. And I’ll also be talking next week and the week after about how to approach the scale element.
Once you’ve pulled together everything, you’d love to have in your master plan, you’ll identify what level of a remodel you’re working towards, and then you’ll be able to make some practical choices about that. The bottom line, though, is that you do need to get started if you’re hoping to take on a remodel in the next couple of years. Now is the time to be planning, and if you’re worried that it will be too expensive or take too long again, the best time to get started is now. One of my various nerdiestnesses Is that I was raised on Lord of the Rings, and I’m a huge Tolkien geek. So I often think of Sam Gamgee saying it’s the job that never gets started, that takes longest to finish. Planning will shorten the rest of the stages, even though they will take longer than we hope.
I also really, really,really want to underline the importance of fully planning your project out before you get started, with the caveat of a level one remodel, we’ll talk about that in a couple of weeks. In general, you want to have a fully fleshed out plan before you start in on your demolition. There’s just a rolling chaos to trying to plan just in time design decisions. I’ve done it in the past, in fact, relatively recently, took it on for a client who went into the process open eyed and knew what they were getting into. I’d warned them in advance that if we started another project before we finalized all the details, we would create more chaos in the in the actual execution.
And they knew that going along and acknowledged it as we encountered those troubles. But it does add stress to a project. So if your timing is tight, that just means you need to plan all the faster. Really, it’s ideal to get your planning done fully in advance before you get started. All right. So as you’re bringing this master plan into focus, one of the things can be incredibly useful, both to make the Master Plan happen, and one of the things you use the master plan for sort of organically, in a chicken and egg manner, is to get buy in for your plans. And that comes from so many other people. It takes a village to raise a child, and I really believe that it’s hard for an individual to plan a house by themselves.
This is true of myself. I have a really hard time making choices for the house that I live alone in, because I don’t have enough other people to bounce it off of. So I seek out feedback from other parts of my extended team, and I’d love for you to build your remodeling team as well. It might consist of family friendly advisors, design professionals, contractors, experts, the city building department. All of this input is. Invaluable, whether you take it seriously, literally or not, getting the opinions of other people does matter.
Now, the opinions of your own family and household might be the most important in a whole remodel, but especially in the kitchen. Typically, there is one person in the household who’s driving the plan for remodel. I typically ask my clients to designate one core contact person for our master planning process, one recent couple who got in touch with me had already divided up their roles as point person and treasurer. In other words, a yes person and a no person. I think that’s great, and I told them so, because they had agreed on that in advance.
There is always, by definition, one half of a couple who’s more invested in the idea of a remodel, both halves need to agree that it’s a good idea, and this goes double or triple in the kitchen, if you don’t actually live alone, you can’t plan a kitchen remodel solo. The kitchen is the heart of a home, even for family members who don’t primarily cook. So you want to get the details right, the space right for the people, including the entire family. It’s really important to get a mechanism in place to share ideas between the person who’s driving the remodel, dreaming about it the most, researching it the most, learning things the most, and the other members of the household.
There’s a couple of different ways to make that happen. It might be that everyone’s invested enough that you could create a shared online document where ideas are getting dropped in all the time, and other people who are less driven by the project can check occasionally.
Sometimes you might want to schedule an intermittent family household meeting to talk about what the latest ideas are, what the latest hitches, hang ups and successes have been, so that everyone is up to date on what’s going on with the project. It doesn’t have to be constant, but sometimes it’s more useful to have an official designated meeting to talk about it, rather than just sort of blurt out ideas over the breakfast table in a way that they might not be fully internalized.
You might find out that you thought you told someone something and they were thinking about the news or what they had going on at work and missed it completely when they said, sometimes you’ll find you need more feedback than just your spouse to workshop a good idea into a great one. In addition to your actual partner in remodeling, you might want to seek out outside advisors.
That might be me, an architect, another designer, expert advice. Obviously, I think that’s a great idea. But even if you don’t have an expert on site, you still need someone to share ideas and bounce ideas off, a parent, a sibling, a best friend, an older child, any of these people can take on that role. You can reach out into your community. It’s a really fun way to stay engaged with someone you don’t get to chat with enough in COVID times, you could have a remote friend who’s remodeling just like you are, or who you’re simply letting Dream Along with you.
Frankly, it can be equally fun for them, if they’re your partner bouncing their dreams off you too, or if they’re living vicariously through your project, since they aren’t in a position to do the same at the moment, you can invite that person to your Pinterest boards, text them your great ideas and chat about it on the phone.
This is also a really great way to involve older children in a remodel. They can have very creative ideas, and it’s a wonderful time to get them invested in thinking about budgets, thinking about your house, and frankly, even imagining what they would use it for now and how the house might change once they’ve grown and gone. As your ideas develop, you’ll also want to get buy in from people outside of your inner circle, from experts that might be as simple as starting in the pricing process.
You start to call subcontractors to come in, look at the house and give you, their perspective. I really encourage you during this part of the process, whether you’re working with a general contractor or managing the project yourself, to take the ideas and input of experts with a grain of salt and always to get multiple versions. That really helps you see if there’s a theme, if every plumber comes into your house has the same thing to say about your underlying pipes, you’ll probably need to take that very seriously.
But if one person comes in making a huge deal, and all of the others seem to think it’s not very important, that might be their internal perspective, a recent bad experience they’d had, or simply an overreaction for other purposes, and you don’t need to take their advice as set in stone.
The more input you get from more interested and disinterested parties, the more that you can make your own educated judgments about what’s important about the house. So I thought this might be an interesting place to talk about what gets included in one of the mid mod Midwest master plans that we prepare for our clients when we’re focusing on a house that needs a kitchen update, and frankly, almost every single house we do, does people generally have one of two problems with their kitchen either It’s original, never been touched before, and it’s desperately in need of some updates, maintenance upgrades, and, frankly, some layout changes, or it’s been overhauled in the past, and it has some horrible 70s or 80s or early 2000s kitchen that doesn’t match the era of house one way or another, we always end up working in the kitchen.
Where I generally start is with the layout, we’ll usually present our clients who are fully overhauling their kitchen with up to three layout options. That have variations on how the space could be arranged, a U shape, an island, an L that opens or closes it to various parts of the house. Even though we always start by talking to our clients about what style of kitchen they’re looking for, what type of Cook they are and what they might like out of the space, we still want to give them a few options to respond to directly in terms of how they might like the space to function.
After we address the layout variations, we talk about some general finish and material approaches that we often like to make for a mid-century kitchen update things like the way to organize storage. An original mid-century kitchen typically organizes the storage around base cabinets and wall mounted cabinets that ring the whole room. We like to open up the space a little bit more by having base cabinets for drawer storage.
Oh, I love drawers and then having a few areas of full floor to ceiling storage that form a handy pantry and gathered in one area of the kitchen that’s lets us open up the walls for more windows and shelving in other parts of the house, we talk about the kinds of cabinets that the particular homeowner might like to choose based on their preferences, and some of the details that they’ll find will work best for their kitchen, some of those style guide elements that we talked about last week, metals, lighting up, down, curtains, natural light in general.
And then we break down and talk about the features of the individual layouts for each of the three kitchen options that we have, whether one might have a built in seating nook, whether one has an island with pull up stool space on the opposite side, the general locations of storage and how much you get. We like to explore this, both in floor plan and with prospective sketches that show you what it might look like to be in the kitchen with each of the various layout options.
Those things tie together in that kitchen part of the master plan with the overall style and choices of the master plan and always show up in miniature in the whole house floor plan that gets included at the start and conclusion of the package. That’ll give you a few ideas for what kind of things you want to be sure to include as you’re assembling your own master plan. Or maybe it’ll inspire you to give mid mod Midwest a call. We’d love to hear from you. I’ll be talking a little bit more about specifics of layouts next week, when I’m talking about level two and three kitchen remodels. It’s not easy, though, to design a good, small space which most mid-century kitchens are Mark Twain once wrote to a friend that he had to write them a long letter because he didn’t have time to write a short one.
And I really hope that you’ll give yourself enough time and planning to create a short letter or a really well designed small space or big enough space for your kitchen, once you’ve thought about everything you’d like to have in your dream kitchen, and everything that seems realistic to you, you’re in a really great place to finalize what level of a remodel you’ll be taking on. This is a topic I return to again and again because it’s really helpful to frame how much you’re trying to accomplish with your own model.
A level one remodel is a simple update that might be done in a weekend DIY project or simply by buying and replacing a few things or adding a few things that you can purchase. A Level Two remodel is a more complicated DIY that bit by bit, can transform a whole room or house. And a level three is the full gut. You’re tearing out walls, you’re tearing things back to the studs you might be adding or reconfiguring the space, and it almost always requires a general contractor to get it done.
So we’ll be talking next week about the kind of big layout changes you can make with a level two or level three remodel, and some experiences I’ve had in the past with clients doing those types of work. And then we’ll wrap up the season with for those of you who aren’t planning a big kitchen remodel right now but have been enjoying listening along a few things you can do right now, this week or this summer, to give your mid-century kitchen some love.
Okay, now that you’ve got your style guide all set, you haven’t done your homework and created your style guide right good. Now you’re ready to take it to the next level with the essential remodel planning spreadsheets. Let’s talk about what you should be tracking to plan a remodel that will fit your life and budget. All right, so the new thing I wanted to do this week, or this season, is a resource of the Week.
This week’s resource is the Idaho modern field guide, the history Care and Keeping of your mid-century home. And this was put together by preservation Idaho and Idaho modern a few years ago. It’s Idaho specific, obviously, that’s in the name, but basically, it’s talking about what homes were like in the post war building boom. And it points out something that I think is really valuable, which is that not all mid-century homes were mid-century modern. In fact, most of them were not.
They were mid-century, vintage, mid-century, traditional, mid-century, colonial builder, basic and then it goes into a bunch of the different parts of a house, windows, doors, roofing, and talks about the materials, the choices you might make, in colors, in products, in fixtures, in built ins, in choosing to add or update a garage or carport. Support things you can do to make your house more vintage appropriate, or just knowledge you might want to have about what your house might have been like when it was originally built, before all of the intervening remodels and updates took over its style.
I think this is a great read, and I highly recommend you check it out. In addition to going through my resources list, which I hope you’ve already downloaded, you can find it also by just going through the website of my friends’ mid-century homes in Boise. Their website is mid-centuryhomes.com and you can find this under the media tab the field guide, if you want to just go straight to it. Boise, mid-century homes is a great resource in general if you’re looking to purchase a mid-century style home in Boise, well, of course, they are your guys and gals, but actually they’re just a wonderful account to follow on the internet, and I should say friends of mine. Internet friends of mine, we’ve been putting together a Q and A weekly series where we talk about the common questions that come up for them as they help people looking to buy and sell mid-century homes, and I answer them from my perspective as an architect.
So check those out. They’re going to be happening on Instagram Fridays for the foreseeable future. We’re really having a fun time doing them, so I don’t know why we’d stop this. Next week, we’re going to be talking about updating front doors. So I hope you’ll be there to check that out. Or, you know, you don’t have to be live. It’ll just stay on the internet forever. You can find their Instagram handle, their website, and the Idaho preservation resource in the links in my show notes, that will be as always at mid mod midwest.com/ 804, and you can also get a download of the entire mid-century essential resources list. It’s a great checklist of books, articles, blogs, product suppliers and concepts people to follow that will get you up to speed and ready to have the most fun managing your mid-century house.
Diving into today’s topic, I talk often about how important it is that before you start picking out all of the individual products, you’re going to use in your home remodel, you need to have a style guide, because unless you start from your style guide, you will get overwhelmed. Today, we’re going to actually talk about the more advanced version of this technique. What you do after your style guide, plan it all out with a spreadsheet.
And I am so excited to talk about this, because I’m a huge spreadsheet nerd. But believe me, you do not just want to jump into making a list of the cool products from the entire internet that is the fastest route to complete remodeling overwhelm. So start from your style guide, and everything in your remodel will go better. You can listen to more content on how to prepare a style guide, and you can grab my free style guide starting resource by going to Episode 407,
or to mid mod midwest.com/style, Guide to download that resource. This will all be in the show notes. Basically, in that episode, I walk you through why it’s so important to take the big picture view first. It has innumerable benefits. Basically, as you create a style guide for your house, focusing on what are the stain colors, the metal types, the color scheme for your home, you can simplify.
You can focus with all of the resources that are available on the internet. Trying to do anything else is just a recipe for complete overwhelm. But building out a style guide, which, as I say in that episode, is more than just a collection of Pinterest boards. It’s really a process of focusing what you want, distilling what you love into the specific types of material, choices you’re going to make again and again through your house remodel project. This is something we go over extensively inside of ready to remodel, because it’s both a simple process and kind of challenging to do.
A lot of people struggle with indecision in their remodel. A lot of people worry that they can’t trust their own choices and their own opinions. A lot of people worry that they’re going to make an incorrect choice for their mid-century home. And we work through the process of how to feel confident about your choices, how to assess that they’re going to work together, how to make enough of to create enough variety in your style guide, so that you aren’t rigidly locked into there’s only one product you could actually pick that will work, but at the same time, to narrow your options down to not being overwhelmed in the Plumbing Island Home Depot, or as you confront the internet on your smartphone or your computer, once you’ve got those things in hand, however, once you’ve got a style guide, you need to go a little bit further in order to plan a remodel.
You can’t just show your style guide to a contractor and trust that they’re going to completely choose every product for you the way you want. You want to be involved in some of these detailed decisions. So the next step beyond the style guide is to then turn those bigger picture choices into specific product selections. This is also where the rubber starts to meet the road in terms of your budget. For example, you might choose to repaint your house dark gray or black. Like a fun current moment.
And by the way, if you’re working in paint, you can do something that’s a little trendy, because you can feel confident that if someone else doesn’t like that trend in the future, they can repaint it in any color of their choice. This is why I recommend painting your siding and not painting your brick, because that is a permanent choice that nobody can undo. But if we’re thinking about exterior, so you’ve got a dramatic, dark sided house.
Now you want something to make it pop. You would like to have a cedar as an accent. You want to have this beautiful wood. It’s got a nice grain. It’s got a gorgeous color, warm amber, mid-century, appropriate. Great. You’re going to put cedar as the detail around your house. This is what happens in your style guide. I want this tone of wood to happen outside now, where the rubber meets the road is you start to price it out.
You talk to a contractor, you find out that right now, still in this moment, now more than a year into the pandemic, it’s really hard to get your hands on Cedar. So shoot. What are you going to do? You can worry about supply line issues. You can extend out your planning window, or you can start to explore what are other options. If the style guide visual was that Amber tone wood, could you do cedar treated pine? Could you get another type of wood and stain it? Are you open to the possibility of a faux wood, a low maintenance decking solution that could be used in place of wood, like a TRex or another. There’s a bunch of brands out there. They’re all relatively comparable.
Basically, you go from I want it to look like this to here’s how we’re going to practically solve that problem. And you might compare one product against another and think about what it feels like to touch. Always get samples. Always get samples. What it costs, what availability it has, where it will be supplied from. If your contractor, perhaps has a deal with a particular company that might weigh in the favor of that product, they might have an easier ability to twist the arm of the person who’s going to get it to them and make sure that it comes on time.
These are all considerations that you start to bring in in in the later decision making phases, as you start to make this decision for one material and then another and then another, it adds up. You will not hold all of this in your head, and you certainly won’t be able to keep track of the links to the websites and the budget numbers and how one budget item compares to another, all in your head or even on paper. So this is where we turn to my dear friend, the spreadsheet. Let’s talk about spreadsheets for a minute.
I have found in my life that you are either a spreadsheet person or you’re not. Now I am one. So take this advice with that perspective. I have spreadsheets that track my business, log movies and TV shows that I want to check out later. Record budget information for past travels. I once made a list of the chronological birth and death dates of all my favorite fictional characters. I was trying to figure out, you know, where do the Jane Austen stories that I love stack up against in the Victorian era? How do these things time out?
So yeah, super nerd, I’m sorry. Did you not know you were listening to a super nerd. You are okay. So of course, I use spreadsheets to keep track of my own and my clients remodeling work, and this is actually something that contractors and architects worth their salt are going to do exactly the same thing. I have a range of these available as a bonus that I share with my design clients, so they can keep track of these things for themselves after we’ve done our master plan. And these are available to my students inside of ready to remodel.
This set of sheets includes a project bid form, which you can use to either request that your contractor fill in or they usually won’t want to do that. Contractors, especially small scale residential remodelers are not generally spreadsheet people. We’re talking about who is and who is not a spreadsheet person, but you can work with them to fill in a spreadsheet with the data they give you, and then you can use the bid Comparison Form to compare apples to apples and make sure that each contractor you’ve talked to is covering the same things and is giving you roughly the breakdown of numbers for the areas of work that you want to do, or for the types of work, electrical versus plumbing versus framing. And then you can say, with an apples to apples comparison, I love you.
Contractor number two, you are a great communicator, and everything else about you is great, but your electrical bid is about twice as high as everyone else’s. Can you talk to me about that? Are you seeing something that I’m not seeing that the other contractors aren’t seeing, or what’s going on? Could we talk about a different electrical subcontractor? This kind of data takes the drama out of price and helps you control how these conversations go. What else falls into this collection of spreadsheets that I keep handy project scope.
Now that doesn’t necessarily have to fall into a spreadsheet. It could be a simple list, but when you put something into one spreadsheet, you can make another tab and another tab and keep them all together a master list for your remodel. In addition to scope, I actually sometimes just have to have, like to have a call log for each of the contractors that I’ve been in communication with. Have marked them down as a GC, an electrician, a plumber, HVAC, where they came from, their contact information, their initial estimate, what they’ve told me about, updated scope when I spoke to them, what we talked about, if I have follow up information, putting all of this stuff down somewhere it might be, for you, a notebook.
For me, I love the spreadsheet format allows me to go to one spot and get that information at a glance. I should say, before I go any further, I like to use Google spreadsheets for this. Now, if you are a Mac person, you might like numbers. If you’re a PC Excel, these inbuilt spreadsheet programs are great, and they might be what you have easiest access to but at some point, during your remodel, you’re going to need to share information with someone, and it can be very helpful to share a document with a spouse or partner, to share a document with a designer, or to share a contractor’s tracking log directly.
Then both of you can get access to the file at the same time, both of you can make edits to it. Both of you can see what’s happening in it. It’s really useful for any part of the project that you’re tracking over time, or that you’re comparing one thing to another, or that you’re aggregating multiple data points together. It’s very helpful to have a spreadsheet. One of the most useful places to use a spreadsheet is for what architects and contractors call a schedule. In this case, they don’t actually mean when something then will happen. They mean a spreadsheet.
And honestly, for the life of me, I have no idea why we call these schedules, but we do so we will for a detailed architecture design prepare, lighting schedules, fixture schedules, finish schedules, Door and Window schedules. These mean basically separate spreadsheets which are linked to a tag and then talk about the various details of each product, finish or appliance that’s going to be included in the house.
Let’s take, for example, a finished schedule. So in your style guide, you might say that all of the metal you’re going to choose for the house is either going to be brass or white. That’s a fun set of choices that are both very contemporary and trendy and also tie back to the mid-century era of your house. Win, win.
So now you know that as you start to look for other things that you need to pick out for your remodel, you’re going to start to make choices. So for example, you’re going to have to pick a kitchen sink faucet. You might choose a brass one. That’s a great choice. It’s not just going to look snazzy. It’s going to dramatically narrow down the number of possibilities you have when you go to Home Depot or when you go online to a website like build.com and start selecting from all possible kitchen sink faucets, as you make your choices, you might be comparing one to another and still keep a couple of options open.
Or you might just pick one, and you might say, I’m going to pick a Moen faucet. It’s going to be a pull down spray style. It’s from the Align line, and it’s actually going to be brushed gold, but it’s going to look brass, because Moen is crazy, and they call brushed gold something that looks like brass. And I’m going to choose just one of them. I only have one kitchen sink, and the price will be this. Then you can put all of that data the object. It’s a kitchen sink faucet.
The manufacturer, Moen, the specification align, pull down, spray faucet. Product number, 7565 BG, finish brushed gold, there’s one. And the unit count, the price there. You’ve got it, and a link to that purchase spot. All of this is put together. You can go ahead and do that for all the different plumbing fixtures, all the different appliances, all the different flooring and wall materials, all the different paint colors, all the different other surfaces, counters, mirror shelves, cabinet, faces and hardware.
You can make all of the choices at once. You can make a list of all the things you’ll need to choose and choose them over time. You can fill in the blanks as you go, and you can use your spreadsheet to highlight in yellow. I haven’t chosen this yet, and at some point, soon, the contractor is going to need that choice from me. What you can often do if you’re making choices like this, if you have specificity like this, before you talk to your contractor, is show them that you know these things about your remodel.
This will actually really help them to price with more confidence. Most contractor pricing is based on labor and materials, and their labor cost will be their estimate of how long they think it’s going to take them to do it. And their material cost will be the price that they think they can get for all of the various raw materials. But they’ll often leave a third category, known as an allowance for specific choices like your kitchen sink faucet, like the light fixtures you’re going to choose, not necessarily the can lights or the sort of functional lights, but for any beautiful surface mount fixture you’re going to choose, and those things can actually add up to a lot of the cost of a remodel, which you don’t see in the contractor’s bottom line, because they’ve left that out as an allowance.
It’s not a trick; it’s just the necessary way that this planning process goes. But for you, you can fill in that blank even before you’ve talked to a contractor, perhaps, or certainly as you go along the way, with your own confident list, your allowance pricing, and the more that you’ve made confident decisions about materiality, about some of the things that will be wrapped into the contractor’s number, the more that they know that you’re going to be the kind of person to work with who’s going to be clear, concise and decisive, and they can then give you a really tight price that’s accurate as much as possible, rather than one that’s got a little bit more squish in it.
And the squish is, for the contractor’s sake, always going to have to make the price go up. There’s a lot you can win, both in your own peace of mind, your own organization, and in the way that you relate to the people that are going to do the work on your house for you, or if you’re going to do it, the simplicity of doing the work on the day with the decisions made in advance, rather than realizing it’s time to install a faucet and then realizing you have to go and pick one while your brain was in production mode. That’s never a great place to be.
Once you’ve got your style guide in place, you can start to create a spreadsheet, a schedule that puts together all of the details that you’re going to do. Keep track of what you want to do and then what you’ve decided to do as you go through the remodel. In the end, basically all of this can add up to the budget of what you spent in your remodel. It’s useful at every stage of the process. The one thing I just want to keep emphasizing as I talk about how wonderful and useful it is to make spreadsheets to track your remodel is you have to start from the big picture and then focus in to get to your confident product by product decisions, start with your style guide, and then work your way down to spreadsheets to track every product you choose.
I hope I’ve gotten you thinking a little bit more positive and in control thoughts about how you’re going to run your remodel keeping track of things in a spreadsheet. If you’re not a spreadsheet person can feel tedious, but if you are one, and even if you aren’t, it is so empowering to see all of the data laid out in front of you, pulling everything together in one place also helps externalize it. So if you’re the kind of person who’s been holding your whole remodeling your head, it can often be very hard to then share that information with your partner or with your team.
Putting it onto Well, I was gonna say, putting it on paper, keeping a digital record of it, is gonna allow you to make this information so much more available to everyone that’s involved in the process. Total. Sidebar, if you happen to know why a remodeling spreadsheet is called a schedule, send me a DM on Instagram and let me know I am fascinated by this.
And a cursory Google did not answer the question for me, so it remains a mystery to me. I love them no matter what they’re called. I hope that you will try using spreadsheets more to manage your remodel. Give me a shout out and let me know if you prefer to manage your details on paper in an old fashioned notebook, or if you have another method for keeping track of your data outside of spreadsheets or something I’ve mentioned, I would love to hear about it.