I want you to become an expert on your home before your remodel.
Note, I did not say that you need to become an expert on remodeling … just on your house.
Why? Because it’s going to smooth every step of your remodel journey!
One good reason to take a few of your own measurements, skim an inspection report, or dig into some MCM history about the original owners by chatting with elderly neighbors, is that these activities will set you up for clever design ideas for your remodel. And they will.
But another super important reason getting familiar with your home is essential to a successful remodel is that the more you feel like an expert in the specifics of your house (not even all of them, just in certain parts of it!) the more you interface confidently with everyone else in the project.
You can still have many areas of uncertainty about anything from mid-century style details, or the mechanics of how your air-conditioning system works.
But when you have a place you can stand and feel confident about something in your house, you can approach that uncertainty as a collaborator and still a leader of your remodel team. Rather than letting someone else tell you what you should do for your house and feeling that you have no option but to take their word for it.
So for today’s episode, I’m sharing my top three very different but all useful ways to become more familiar with your house:
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Resources
- Get Ready to Remodel, my course that teaches you to DIY a great plan for your mid mod remodel!
- Want us to create your mid-century master plan? Apply here to get on my calendar for a Discovery Call!
- Need some targeted home advice? Schedule a 30-minute Zoom consult with me. We’ll dig into an issue or do a comprehensive mid century house audit.
And you can always…
- Join us in the Facebook Community for Mid Mod Remodel
- Find me on Instagram:@midmodmidwest
- Find the podcast on Instagram: @midmodremodelpodcast
Read the Full Episode Transcript
I want you to be the expert in your home before you remodel. You don’t have to be an expert in remodeling, just in your home. Now, one good reason to take a few measurements on your own, skim an inspection report or dig into mid-century history by chatting with elderly neighbors on the block is to set you up for clever design ideas when you remodel.
But another super important reason is that the more expert you feel in some of the specifics of your house, not even all of them, just certain parts, the more you can confidently interface with everyone else on the project, the more you can lead from what you really want, rather than feeling buffeted about by the advice and the opinions of everyone that you ask for help.
Hey there. Welcome back to mid mom 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 Episode 2121 as I said last week, I’m taking off July from recording the podcast, but I am not meaning for you to take off listening. In fact, I’m pretty excited about the deep dive in our archives that I’ve got planned for you. If you want to go back, you might check out some of the over 250 episodes I have recorded, but I’ve curated a few of my favorite podcasts from several years ago, maybe before you started listening, or if not, a good reminder from four years ago in your listening history to pair episodes that will take us on a spin through the master plan, method from start to finish.
Last week we talked about dreaming that is setting your priorities, getting in touch with your deeper why, so that everything you do in your remodel will be tailor made for you. And this week, we are talking about the next part of predesign before you start answering questions, you are still setting yourself up for the right questions. So like I said, you might still have many areas of uncertainty, lack of expertise about anything in your home, from mid-century style details to the mechanics of how your air conditioning system works. But when you have something, you feel confident about in your home.
You can stand there, feel confident there, and you can approach other areas of uncertainty as a collaborator, as still a leader of your remodeling team, rather than only as a student, letting someone else tell you what you should, what you must do for your house, and feeling that you’ve got no other option but to take their word for it. So for today’s episode, I’ve pulled together three very different but all useful ways to become more familiar with your house. The first one is a super fun, easy way to learn more about the design details of the mid-century era, and that’s just to watch some vintage TV or movies and notice what’s going on in the houses or buildings around the plot as it takes place, or if it’s more your style to see glossy high end modern media, check out some good modern reproductions of the mid-century era.
I’m going to share a couple of my favorite pieces of mid-century set fiction. And if you have a favorite that I don’t mention here, or maybe that hadn’t come out yet when I originally recorded this episode, shoot me an email, send me an Instagram DM and let me know what to add to this list. Then let’s go in a completely different direction of house discovery, house expertise, and get serious about documentation. I’m going to walk you through a quick step by step on how to measure your house so that you’ll have an accurate working floor plan to get creative with in next week’s episode, this sort of thing is what you can share with an expert or a consultant.
You can pull important information out of this, like square footage, so you can do quick cost analysis, and you can also brainstorm creative layout changes once you’ve got a working floor plan, doesn’t need to be a work of art, just a working floor plan. Finally, a little advice on where to go for inspiration, about the changes you might make. Look I love atomic ranch magazine as much as the next girl, but it’s often a very unrealistic place to reach for when you’re starting from a modest Midwestern bridge brick ranch house, for example, or just a modest budget of energy and time and money, many of the magazine gorgeous houses we see even in social media that are being described as recently remodeled actually also started from a place of being quite astonishingly fantastic, designed by an architect in a unique location with an almost bottomless budget or some material or design feature that can’t easily be retrofit.
And therefore the current remodel is just taking advantage of that. So I think instead, it’s a great place to check out relatable mid-century inspiration on places like Instagram, where you can scroll back to the beginning of the feed and see what that homeowner was starting from. You can also watch their process and reach out and ask them questions about why they did what they did. I think you’ll find all three of those episodes to be really helpful and set you up well to have completed the predesigned phase of your remodel planning and move into creative problem solving. If you want to find the links to those original episodes, see any of the imagery or the list of movies and TV shows, I recommend go check out the show notes at mid mod midwest.com/ 2121 And there you go.
Undertaking a home remodel can be stressful, but dreaming about it and planning for it shouldn’t be today. Let’s talk about some fun ways to dip your toe into the waters of mid-century design and get great ideas for your home update. Here’s the sad fact so many parts of planning a remodel are complicated, expensive and stressful. No matter how you slice it, you’re going to have to spend money, agree with your spouse or partner, negotiate, judging between multiple contractor bids, choosing materials and setting your priorities. It’s a lot, but it doesn’t all have to be stressful.
Trying to combat that stress is why I came up with the mid-century Master Plan method to try to short circuit some of the most crazy making elements of planning a remodel. In the process of creating a master plan, you take the time to examine your hopes and dreams so you can set real priorities. You learn about your home so you can become the expert in what your house actually needs. You set up a style guide to simplify the infinite product decisions that come along the way, and you workshop multiple options so that when you look at your final house when it’s all done, you know you chose the right schemes for yourself. In short, you take a big picture approach to the project so you can set your scale, your priorities, and keep an eye on the bottom line as you plan now, those elements of the master plan process are all about making hard things a little less difficult.
So today we’re going to talk about how to let your planning process, your research, just your interest in mid-century design be fun, whether you like to read about history or walk past it on the street. I bet you can find some fun sources of information for you in this episode, because we don’t all learn the same way. So one size, one method of learning doesn’t fit all in putting together this episode, I’ve added some new resources to my super useful must have mid-century ranch resources list. This download. The last time I updated it had 56 articles, books, magazines, product suppliers and more to check out. I’ve just been updating it as I put this together, and I’ve added a few new books that have come out since my previous publishing, plus added categories for movies and TV shows, even YouTube videos, and re upped my list of product suppliers.
Plus I’ve added a few more internet accounts you might want to be following if you love mid-century design. In short, the list has grown as of right now. It’s swelled past 80 items, and I think I’m going to think of a few more before this podcast goes to air. But don’t worry, this isn’t homework. This resource list is broken down into bite sized categories, so you can skip right to the medium or subject of your choice.
Grab it at mid bond, midwest.com/resources to get started on learning more about mid-century design, however you like to learn, you can find it also in the show notes with also links to the references I’ll make throughout the episode and an outline of the conversation at mid mod midwest.com/ 802, all right, so let’s talk about, to my mind, one of the most Relaxing ways to learn about mid-century design, and that is to take it in while you relax over Netflix in the evening, you could go hunting specifically for mid-century type entertainment, or just appreciate it when it pops up on your screen. If you are hunting for a few mid-century oriented films and TV shows, I’ll give you a list someplace to get started, North by Northwest, which came out in 1959.
This is a classic Hitchcock thriller, and it was set in a Wright inspired house, jutting out dramatically over a cliff. It’s not actually a real place. It was a film set designed by MCM for the movie, but it is absolutely chock a block of mid-century design glory, if you’d rather watch a more modern movie set in a mid-century time. Check out The Big Lebowski, the chill factor of the dude, abiding while he bowls in a classic vintage bowling alley. Sits in siren and tulip chairs and relaxes under the stunning triangular vaulted roof of the shades Goldstein residence designed by John Lautner for more John Lautner architecture, you might check out a single man.
This movie builds the entire character development around the architecture. It uses the house as a metaphor for its owner’s sense of the dissolution of the life he had after he loses his partner. To see mid-century design on the small screen.
Of course, the classic, everyone has to recommend. It, Mad Men. I love the sets, but kind of can’t stand the show. I’m not an anti-hero person. You could alternate that with the marvelous Mrs. Maisel. And this is mid-century modern as it slots into New York apartment living. It’s more about interiors than architecture, but the set and costume design give you everything you could want about mid-century high life in the era we love.
Or if you want to go hopscotching through history, check out Wandavision, not only for Marvel fans, this oddball Disney plus show that came out last winter, just about a year ago. It’s time for a re watch from me. You get to watch the show hop through. The 50s, the 60s, the 70s and the 80s, recreating classic sets like the I Love Lucy show set and the one they used in the Brady Bunch. Another one of my go to favorite mid-century movies, not actually from the mid-century, is down with love. This is a modern send up of the classic MCM sex comedy. You get all the glory of the colorful costumes, the wood paneled New York office buildings in the crazy bachelor pad of the pillow talk style Man Trap apartment without the creep factor of the door that locks when you push a light switch button on the inside.
Not for me. And then, here’s an unexpected choice. Get over it. This is a 2001 teen comedy, loosely reprising Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream set in a series of California they’re actually Canadian modernist houses that I can’t get enough of, from the homes to the high school. It’s a nice reminder that we still live in and appreciate the buildings of the past. So when you’re thinking about what you want to watch this weekend, think about something that’s set in the mid-century era. If none of the things I’ve mentioned here grab you check out a million internet lists of mid-century inspired films and TV, or re watch a few movies or shows that filmed actually in mid-century times.
I hope you don’t share this bad habit with me, but honestly, in these days you might. Do you ever scroll on social media while the TV’s on? I hate to admit that I do you can tune the algorithms of your various social media feeds. I’m going to talk about Instagram here. If you follow the right kinds of accounts, you’ll eventually start to see mostly what you want to see. In addition to keeping up on our friends lives and cute puppies and children, we can follow mid-century accounts. There’s, of course, the sort of mid mod greats.
Off the top of my head, you might want to be following modernister Tim Ross’s account, where he posts just stunning pictures of modernist architecture from all overusing his own photos and occasionally has videos where he talks about his love for mid-century design, classic buildings and occasionally cars. It’s total eye candy. Let’s see what else. Of course, the atomic Ranch is just a smorgasbord of amazing graphic design and interiors as well as architecture from all over the country, although mostly the West Coast.
They also feature the work of some of my favorite mid-century designers, Ellen waters, at exactly designs and Aletha VanderMass of true home restorations, have both shown up on their website. If you want to do some armchair traveling, check out the account of @modtraveler. Ken McIntyre is a writer who travels and photographs amazing architecture, Vancouver, Vegas, Palm Springs And more. He’s always highlighting the glorious breeze block signage, cars and dramatic buildings of the mid-century era we love. And then there’s mid-century home, which is an online magazine that features stunning interiors, mostly of mid-century buildings. The account has 300,000 followers.
If you’re not one of them, I don’t know why you’re not, but there are also smaller accounts you can check out. For example, I really love the eye of at design explorers. Merrile Amaki is an architecture enthusiast in California. Her photos and her feed are stunningly captured mid-century buildings she’s visited. And then she also has great stories where she just walks around places, she’s been and shows off slices of life in mid-century residential neighborhoods. Definitely give her account a follow.
Now, in addition to that popcorn off the top of my head, list of capital A architecture accounts, if you’re planning to update your mid-century home, I highly recommend that you follow the Instagram accounts of other mid-century homeowners who are working on updates of their own. You can actually learn more from regular folks who are tuning and transforming their mid-century era homes. Their ideas and projects may be more useful and more accessible than the gorgeous magazine spread type ideas you’ll find in atomic ranch and more.
The reason is the kind of projects that get featured in magazines have budgets and bones the beginning building that people were starting with that are often not what we have access to if we are owners of a regular mid-century ranch. So if you’re looking for ways to tune up your own home. You might be best off by following the accounts of people with houses just like yours. These folks aren’t necessarily designers, but they are lovers and curators of their own mid-century houses. I’m going to rattle off a list really quickly here, but you can go to my Instagram account or check the link in the show notes to grab each and every one of these accounts to follow, you might want to check out the Cohen Fumero house, which was a gorgeous, architecturally significant house in Charlotte, North Carolina, that was the victim of a tragic remuddle That basically threw it into the 90s, and now it’s being slowly brought back by owners who appreciate the stunning paneling and the other many fine features you.
Yeah, this house is done but was really lovingly done up. If you follow the at Wildwood modern account, you can see all of the ongoing home improvements and sort of magical DIY projects that have made this house go from mid-century bland to modern, amazing. I love the work in progress that is the Longacre house. This is a place to go if you love the color apple green. This homeowner is committed to the original choice of the house, which has these great apple green cabinets in the kitchen, and they have just leaned into that color choice. And they’re doing wonderful updates in and around the house as they have time and resources, plus they also do house logos, so they’re really fun. The Bucha project is a 1963 raised ranch in Saskatchewan that had a definite 90s flavor when the new owners took it over, but they’ve been slowly transforming it back to its mid-century era with verve and beautiful details.
Hello. Refuge is a great homeowner account. Also a blog with documentation of very enthusiastic first time homeowner with an eye for design can make happen. This should be an inspiration for anyone who wants to DIY the most in their mid-century home. And then, if you’re a collector of mid-century items, you should be following Farah 11 cat. It’s a mid-century house actually built from scratch in our own era, mid-century style, not mid-century origin, but it is a microcosm of the mid-century style.
And the account is filled with wonderful vintage object collections that are always increasing. I always joined update from this account, so that’s just a few. I keep this list up to date, so I’m always adding new homeowner accounts when I find them, I hope you’ll give it a follow, because really, there’s nothing more confidence inspiring than watching someone else with a house that looks a lot like yours start to make updates to it in a really conscious way. It would be so wrong of me not to give you any ideas for how to get mid-century design concepts without getting away from screens.
So if you’re planning a vacation, you can plan your trip around or just take a little side trip along to explore mid-century design wherever you go. I’m a firm believer that you can find mid-century houses, civic building, roadside stops all around you just by looking. But if you want more assistance, why not get a guide to the mid-century icons you could be visit. One of the books I’ve added to my resources list is mid-century modern architecture travel guides, one for the East Coast and one for the West, by Sam Lovell and Darrell Bradley.
Basically they take you on town by town. Guide to finding the mid-century architecture icons in the places you might already be going. I hope they do the Midwest next but until they do, don’t worry, you can actually go and find mid-century stuff to look at all around. If you want some help, you can actually use this for both travel and for staying at home. I’m going to talk you through a couple of the ways that I use to hunt for mid-century neighborhoods. Wherever I go, if you’re looking for house ideas, specifically, start by just taking a spin through Zillow listings.
Yeah, I know we’re back on screens again, but this is the easiest way, and you can actually use search terms for mid-century or mid mod when you search for recent listings. If you find one mid-century style house in a neighborhood, chances are you can just go to that neighborhood and find a whole lot more of them. You can also use Google Maps to help you in your search. If you practice you can spot a Ranch neighborhood from the air. I tend to run a quick calculation of whether the town I’m looking at my own or another one had any major growth opportunities since the post war in manufacturing towns or smaller Midwestern cities surrounded by farmland the mid-century, neighborhoods are sometimes the outer ring of development. In Madison, there’s a heavy ring of mid-century era surrounded by more concentric rings, sort of blobby shaped of 70s and 80s contractor specials and then mid Mansons on larger lots from the 90s to the 2000s another way to look is to check out elementary schools.
If you can find a mid-century elementary school the mid-century neighborhood will be around it. The mid-century building boom went hand in hand with a baby boom. So the new neighborhoods filled up with families of kids who needed to go to school. You can tell at a street view on Google Maps if you found a school from the mid-century era, and then you’ll find the mid-century neighborhood around it.
Over time, you can build a mid-century treasure map of your own town, and also wherever you travel, you can just keep your eye peeled for either mid-century infill houses and older neighborhoods or the mid-century parts of town that you want to visit, even when I’m going to visit friends or family, I always take a little bit of time out of every trip to go strolling, sometimes while chatting with those same friends and Family through the mid-century neighborhoods with my camera handy.
It’s amazing the ideas you can find, especially if you’re traveling outside of your own region to cross pollinate back into your home place, with cool ideas for front door updates, fences, landscaping, color schemes and more. Even if the only vacation you’re planning right now is a staycation, take a needle. Get your own hometown. If you keep your eyes peeled for mid-century design, you’ll find it all around you. You don’t have to assign yourself homework to get great ideas for your home improvement. Just let mid-century obsession seep into your day to day activities. Come on in the water’s fine.
Movies, TV shows, your scroll time, your vacations and just running errands around town can all provide fodder for your planning and dreaming. Today, I want to talk to you about how to properly document your house, how to make a floor plan for yourself, maybe more, how to make a model of your house that you can use to make design decisions and carry on and go forward with over time. So I’m sharing this here for ready to remodel. It’s also going to go out to the mid mod remodel podcast. This is also information I share with my master plan design clients, because mid mod Midwest is a design business born in the pandemic. I’d only been specializing in mid-century remodels for a few years in 2020 and I was still working entirely as a solo designer.
And so in March of 2020, when the powers that be told us all to just stay home, guys, we’ll tell you when not to, I finished up the drawings for the projects in progress, wondering how I was going to even explain them to my clients without a fun across the coffee table chat and because I didn’t use Zoom at that point, and I reached out to my next up clients from the My waiting list and said, I assume you don’t want to go forward under these circumstances. I offered to give back their down payments, if necessary, given the uncertain times, but they all told me, No, we want to keep going.
Maybe we’ll do more of the remodel ourselves. This seems like a great time to move forward on it. And I thought, Okay, I’m happy to still have work, but I wasn’t sure how I could start the process if I couldn’t go into their homes and document them and make floor plans for myself to start from. As it happened, several of those next up clients were pretty can do folks. They had done some remodeling before and had some experience with a measuring tape and making paper plans.
So we agreed that we would try it, that they could document their own homes, email me scans of their measurements, take a whole lot of digital photos, and we would see how it worked. Long story short, it did the next time. Then I got a call from a podcast listener who asked if I could please help them think about changes to their home in California. I said, Sure, if you can document it yourself, I can design a mid-century master plan for you, and thus a remote design business was born nowadays.
My team and I work with people all over the country on planning updates for mid-century homes. We’ve helped toward homeowners in Florida and Minnesota, in Washington, DC, in Washington State, plenty in California and, of course, still a lot here in the Midwest. One note, this process works so well for us, for everyone inside of ready to remodel, because we are speaking specifically about mid-century homes. They aren’t just livable, lovable, cute and in style right now.
They’re also built in a really consistent manner, which makes them easier to document, easier to measure, easier to understand, the structure of both for me and my team remotely and for you as homeowners, because they exist at that intersection between the era of craft in construction, the old craft trains craftsmen, and the new standardized materials and methods of the machine age addicts in mid-century, homes tend to be simple triangles built with stick framing, not yet engineered trusses.
Main floors are supported on outer foundation walls with central beam lines on wood posts. The structures are two by fours, two by sixes, two by eights, two by 10s other dimensional lumber. These things are so consistently true across the mid-century era and across the country that we can make very informed assumptions about the structures of these houses in a way that’s not possible for the more irregular construction of, say, a Queen Anne house from the Victorian era, or a 1980s tract home that was built from a template made by engineers and has pre-engineered trusses supporting it.
So without digressing too much from the point, I just want to point out that the beautiful simplicity of the construction of these houses that we work on, that we love, that we live in, is one more silver lining, one more benefit. Silver Lining is a bad thing. One more added benefit that allows us to make more changes, to make simple additions, to knock through walls, to figure out where load bearing elements are and work around them or change them as needed.
So if you live in a mid-century house, you have this extra freeway leeway, this extra freedom to make fun choices, to explore, to experiment with the layout of your home in a way that people in older homes and newer homes don’t. That’s why you might want to measure so let’s talk about the philosophy of measuring a house. When I am measuring a space the way that I measure it actually depends on the tool I’m using to measure. And there are a couple of different ways I do this. You might choose to be writing down the measurements of the space.
Maybe. A rough sketch for yourself, a messy, quick and dirty plan, rather a small space, like a bathroom or maybe an entire floor plan. And then you’ll be transforming that rough, messy, sketchy drawing into a prettier, more tidy drawing, or possibly into an AutoCAD plan or ad model. The other philosophy is to do it all as you go. You might choose to document your home directly into your laptop, making a model that you build as you go, or making an AutoCAD document that’s perfectly accurate and finished each part as you do it. I have done this on my own home.
This is not ever how I work on a client’s project. It’s just too fussy and too slow as a process of first you document, and then you make a model, then you make as built plans. So it’s something you can do if you want to, if you’re already comfortable with the computer, if you’re more comfortable with a computer than you are with a pencil and pen, go right ahead. But I probably am going to be talking more today about the let’s make a rough sketch first and then go forward from there. Now there’s a couple of ways to do that rough sketch.
Let’s start with the old school way. The tools for the old school way of documenting a house and a field measurement session is tape measure, pencil, paper, straight edge and a clipboard. There is nothing wrong with this, especially if you are old school and you think you’re going to be hand sketching your options for the house. If you think you’ll be brainstorming in Sketch format on paper, then this is a great way to go about it.
And in that case, think about starting your document on graph paper. I like quarter inch graph paper, and then you can make it a quarter inch equals one foot. You can fit a mid-sized ranch onto a single piece of eight and a half by 11 paper that way. And if you need more space, you can tape it on around the edges. A word of warning, though, graph paper is a little bit of an exception, but you want to be consistent with yourself, either draw your rough plan exactly to measurement. So for example, if a wall in a room is 11 feet, you might measure out the exact 11 feet, 11 quarter inch squares on the graph paper, but also write down 11 feet.
If you aren’t drawing on graph paper, don’t worry about measuring it to be exactly 11 feet in proportion to everything else. Just write down 11 feet, zero inches. And then when you’re done, when you’re done, when you’re making your pretty plan or your model, you’ll have that data, and you won’t have to wonder, did I draw it that long because that’s how long it actually is, or did I draw it that long because I was moving on to measure something else and I forgot always write down the numbers of the dimensions. I like to draw a floor plan and pencil and then put the numbers in pen. I can scratch out the number and change it if I need to.
But a measurement, a number, is something I have measured. I know that’s a known quantity. Sometimes the layout that I’m sketching in, as I measure changes as I’m like, oh, there’s a chimney here. Oh, this actually the proportion is slightly different, especially if you’re being sloppy and you’re not using grid paper, a pencil plan with pen measurements on it. Just the best way to go. Now, one other tip is, however you stand in the room, you’re facing each of the four walls in the room to measure, hold your clipboard the same way, maybe stand in the same orientation, face south or face north the whole time you’re measuring, so that all the numbers on your plan will face the same way up when you’re looking at it at the end process.
That’s also true for the slightly less old school method, in my opinion, slightly better method of making your floor plan on a tablet. And that sound effect was me throwing my Apple pencil on the ground. By the way, don’t do that. Um, if you are going to field measure with a tablet, it’s nice to have a front song bag or a tablet case that you can hang off of your person in some way so they don’t have to send, set your tablet down onto random surfaces all the time, or drop it while you’re measuring.
Now, I love documenting a field measure with a tablet, because you can treat it just like the old pen and paper method, but you can erase, you can annotate. You can make extra layers. If you’re documenting your whole house, you might have a layer for the basement and a layer for the first floor. Or you might have a layer for the plans and a separate layer for all the measurements, the numbers. Or you might have a layer for the measurements the numbers and a separate layer for notes so they can overlap each other and be turned on and off.
You might choose to show structure in some parts or furniture and then be able to turn that off, either the pen and paper method or the tablet method. Remember, it does not need to be beautiful. It does not need to be a work of art. It just needs to contain accurate information. The other reason I like documenting with a tablet is that it makes it easy to switch back and forth between making your floor plan and then taking a photo with the tablet and annotating right on that photo.
So in some cases, in a small room like a bathroom or in a complicated area like the steps from the basement up to the main floor, you can take a photo, and then you can say this step is seven inches high and 10 inches deep, but the next step is. Three and three quarters and then 11 inches deep. Why? God knows. By the way, I mentioned three quarters stairs are one of the only places where I would break down your measurements below a quarter to a quarter of an inch.
In general, for our purposes, for schematic documenting of a house, we’re dealing with inches and maybe half inches. The third method, slightly less old school to document your house, is a scanning app. There are several out there. We recommend to our clients an app called Magic plan. You literally download it and then you walk around your house, pointing your phone at different surfaces, and it makes a more or less accurate model of each room and of the whole home.
You’ve got a plan version and the model version. It works pretty well for empty homes in a realtor transition and medium well for homes that are works in progress. Regardless of how you measure, you are going to also want to take so many photos to back up your work with evidence now you’re measuring the house you live in, that’s great. You can always go back and check your own references, but particularly if you’re finishing this up to share with someone, or you want to move from one phase into another, it’s better not to be constantly.
You’re sitting at your kitchen table sketching options, and then you’re thinking, Oh, I didn’t accurately measure the bathroom enough. I’m going to go check it again. It’s better to just document everything once and then be able to work on paper. Particularly if you’re a mid-month Midwest client and you’re sending us information, we want all the information at one time. All right, so let’s talk about what you would measure in a space, because it will matter.
Some things are more important to measure than others, depending on the goal of the project. What’s most important is where the walls are, the overall room dimensions, major length, major width. And then if there are any projecting walls, a closet that sticks in, or another room that intersects with it, all those intermediate lengths, get all the wall lengths and check that the corners are right angles. If the corners are not right angles, if the corners throughout the entire house are right angles. Ignore this entire lecture and just get help from a professional to document your house.
But if you have one or two angles in the house that aren’t a right angle, make a note of that. The next most important thing to know is where the openings in the room are. So know the placement and the dimensions of the window and door openings. Watch out for odd sized doors. Typically, a door is going to be coming in a standard of two inch options. So they’ll be referenced by their width in inches, by professionals, not by inches and feet. You’ll have a 24 inch door, a 30 inch door, a 32 inch door, a 36 inch door. If you have an odd number door, if it’s 31 definitely make a note of that.
And then be very aware that you’d like to preserve that door as it is, because replacing it will be a pain in your behind. How you measure the door, you might also want to note the door heights. A standard door in a mid-century house is 80 inches tall. Probably every door in your house has the same height. If there’s one that’s different. Make a note of that. If they’re all not 80 inches, make a note of that.
For the windows, you need to know how wide they are, how tall they are, and the sill height, that’s how high from the floor to the bottom of the window they are. And just like the doors you’re looking to measure to the inner jam and the sill, that’s the innermost major edge, that’s perpendicular to the direction of the wall. In a door, it might be easier just to measure the door itself rather than the slightly bigger door opening.
Windows are typically set up such that their top edge is the same as the top height of all the doors. But if it’s not you can note that. But if you have the window width, height and sill height, you should be able to extrapolate that as you go forward, if the windows are all the same size in the room, you might just notice. You might just note them to their nearest dimension and say their size is typical. The next most important piece of information you want to collect is where the built ins are.
Maybe if you’re keeping them, it can help to know the basic dimensions of the built in cabinets in a kitchen or bathroom, even if you’re planning to change them just as you’re moving pieces around, you might think about, Do I have as many counter storage elements in the new layout as I did in the old or more ideally, but that matters less if you’re planning to fully demo the space and start over similarly, knowing where the fixtures are does matter. Usually you want to know at least the basics of the plumbing.
What you really want to know is the center line of the plumbing fixtures. We’re not interested in how wide the existing toilet is. That isn’t the key measurement. What we want to know is how far is it from the nearest wall or vanity or other plumbing tool. And the code requirement there is that you need to have at least about 30 inch witch, 30 inch with niche words around a toilet. But what that is actually in practical terms, is 15 inches on center, from the center of the toilet to the nearest thing on either side, preferably 18 inches.
When it’s a vanity, we do care about the dimensions of the vanity, both lengths. Width, height should be standard. But we probably also want to know the center line of any plumbing fixtures, if there’s one sink or two, how far spaced apart they are, you might want to write that down. Finally, we get into the semi extraneous details, electrical outlets, light fixtures, vents and more. Once you’ve noted all the major objects in the room, you might think about wanting to think about some of these other details.
This matters less if you’re moving everything around, but if you’re planning to just replace most of your fixtures in kind, you do want to know where the fixtures are. You might not care where the vent ducts are and the outlets are if you’re keeping everything exactly where it goes and just updating finishes. So this is an important thing to think about. How much do you plan to change? How much information do you need to gather? When we are asking our clients to document for us, we don’t ask them to measure the dimensions of where the outlets are.
We do ask for photographs of every service in the room so we can look and get an estimate of where outlets and ducts exist. But we don’t ask them to measure so let’s talk briefly about how to document what you’ve measured. Oh, by the way, measuring tape measure super essential, no matter what you use, but I highly recommend you get yourself a laser measuring device, the kind that you put planted but and up against a wall. Point the red.at the opposite wall, and it will tell you inches and feet exactly how far away that wall is.
Not only will it make your life more conveniently do this, it’s handy throughout a remodeling process, and it just makes you look real cool. They’re not that expensive, and they’re totally worth it. I swear by mine, it’s amazing. Okay, so when you are measuring, how do you write down what you’ve measured? As I mentioned before, plumbing, you’re going to take a lot of measurements, actually from center so you’ll either use a point source system for dimensions or a measurement string system for dimensions.
And what that means is, if you’re taking your measurements with a laser measure, you’ll put your laser up against the surface you’re measuring. Or if it’s in the middle of the room, like a toilet, you’ll put it visually pretty close to the center line and point it at the nearest adjacent wall. When you’re writing in plan, you’ll put a little right angle arrow and point it at the next object you’re measuring to, and then, say, measuring a wall with two outlets on it.
For example, I might write by the first outlet two foot zero inches from adjacent wall with a little arrow, and the next outlet I would list as being six foot zero, inches from the adjacent wall. But if you’re taping your measurements with a tape measure, you would do them differently. Then it becomes irritating to constantly reach back to the original wall. In that case, it’s easier to say that the first outlet is two feet from the wall, and then from center to center, the next outlet is four feet away.
Hopefully that makes sense. Remember, you can make a plan as messy as you want to on paper, as long as you yourself can read it, or the person who’s going to be making the final plan can read it. And then you can also just take a lot of extra photos in the room, or take photos and annotate on them, if necessary.
One more thing, what if you already have floor plans? Do you even need to measure? And the answer again, of course, is maybe, if you have realtor generated plans, that kind of space planning diagram that lists the dining room is 10 feet by 12 feet, and then the next adjacent space is 12 feet by 10 feet. And you’re confused which direction they need is, which you can use that as the base drawing for your messy as built sketch, but you want to go in and add all those other measurement details into it, that closet that projects into the room and how big the windows actually are, if you are fortunate enough to have the architects original plans fully for you, but you still might have some homework to do, because there’s a reason that we call The plans taken by the modern architect or a contractor, the plans I’ve been talking about this whole time, the as built plans, their plans of what was really constructed.
And that isn’t always the same thing as what the blueprints show. In some cases, things have been modified over the years, as other people lived in the house, and sometimes things were just not built the way the architect originally drew them. So if you’re lucky enough to have blueprints, I would at least do this. Take them in hand with you as you walk through the house, seriously, and just make sure that all the windows and doors that are shown exist and that nothing in the plan is mirrored a fireplace on the opposite wall.
And make pop a laser measure along all the major dimensions and make sure that the House didn’t get two feet bigger or smaller for some reason of economy of scale at the time of construction. So what’s our takeaway here? You’ve got several options for how to document pen and paper, the tech replacement for pen and paper, which is tablet, tablet and stylus, or you can go directly into your computer, and how you choose which one to do, really kind of depends on what matters most to you.
Think so think about what you plan to do as you go into the draft phase of your remodel, or the next person who’s helping you with your design plans that might be US does. If you want to only work on pen and paper, if you will never think about anything using a computer, then there’s no reason for you. Use a tablet or to use a computer in your documentation. When you’re thinking about how much you document, how detailed you get plan really depends on how much you plan to change.
So I would recommend that even if you’re documenting your whole home, but not working on all of it, you’re going to leave the bedroom wing entirely alone, at least put that in proportionally, diagrammatically, with major room dimensions in place. Ironically, if you plan to fully gut your house, you need to know less about what’s happening inside of it, just those major dimensions and structure points again.
But if you hope to save your plumbing bill by keeping the toilet exactly where it is while you shift one fixture just slightly, if you want to keep the wiring in place and just replace some things in kind, then you likely want to document in great detail and know everything you can about your home. Okay, so that is our little cheerful pep talk on how to properly document your house. This is obviously a very visual subject that I’m just talking to you about, but I’ll have a couple of diagrams and examples of the various types of measurement that I am talking about in the show notes page of the podcast. So check it out there.
When we’re working on remodeling mid-century homes, we don’t need to reinvent the wheel, because there are so many similar houses out there that have been updated by so many other homeowners who had the same problems. The challenges of an MCM home are common, and so are the solutions. So today I’m going to talk about where to find great MCM remodeling ideas. Hint, it’s not on HGTV.
There are probably upwards of 15 million mid-century ranch houses in the USA. There’s just no need to reinvent the wheel when you run into a knotty design problem or a knotty pine siding problem. Oh, sorry about the pun. The key though is to play to your home’s strengths and know what its weaknesses are going to be. As you know from listening to the podcast, I’m no preservationist. I don’t think we all need to be living in museums, but I think we should work with the houses we have.
If you don’t love MCM style homes, well, why are you listening to me talk right now? Mostly, I want to congratulate all of you who are listening on picking out a style of house that so closely aligns with modern life. I mean it. You don’t have to do much to bring it from kind of tired and looking its age to peak retro modern Vogue, but your house will go better if you stick to the MCM period and don’t try to turn a ranch into a cottage, the first place you should turn when you’re facing a challenge in updating your mid-century era home and looking for MCM remodeling ideas is to what other homeowners like yourself have tried.
And the second is to go back to mid-century first principles and see what cool MCM design ideas could have been incorporated into your house when it was first built but weren’t then add them. So when you’re at home and you’re feeling at a loss as to what to do in some particular area, your go to resource should not be HGTV, and it should not be whatever they’re pushing this week at Home Depot. Those are solutions for non-ranch houses.
As always, you’re going to hear me suggest strongly that you lean into the mid-century style of an MCM era home. This will help you in three ways. One, when you’re working within your home style, you can feel confident to defend it against all comers. Don’t let a kitchen designer, a big box store employee or your own contractor push you into changing your home’s essential character.
Two, when you know and love what you’re dealing with, you can keep and improve on the good things and still feel free to make changes that you need to fit your own life, but the baseline of your house is already great for you. And three, before you start banging your head against the walls, look around, someone else has had the same problem with their MCM home, and they have solved it with MCM remodeling ideas that you can steal.
So because there are 15 million ranch houses in the States, they have many common features. The chances are if your kitchen or your garage or your bathroom is bugging you, you’re not the first person to feel that way, because there are a few key ideas around mid-century house that just don’t align that well with modern life. And the good news is we can fix them. All right, let’s get into this. If you are in a builder grade mid-century home that needs an update, then you have two really helpful wells of ideas to pull from when you improve on it.
The first is the solutions to common mid-century house problems that other owners like yourself have already attempted, successfully. And you can go a lot of places to find those. One might be right here on the mid mod remodel podcast or joining the mid mod remodel Facebook group to find out what other fellow listeners of the show are up to. You can find so many ideas on the wonderful world of mid-century Instagram. There are so many people taking on projects large and small, to breathe new life into mid-century homes. That’s your first start.
The second is just to return to the first principles of mid-century design that may or may not have been incorporated in your home when it was first built. What are the great mid-century concepts that your house doesn’t include, or only does, in shorthand, do? Here’s an example of what I mean, the picture window standard in a builder grade 1950s Ranch, just like mine. This is the conceptual child or cousin to the floor to ceiling glass windows, sliding door, California style modernist house, the kind where the roof is supported by post and beam structure.
So the barrier between indoor and outdoor living can really begin to dissolve. It’s a magical effect, and a picture window doesn’t quite capture it. But if you’re in a position where you need to replace some or all of the windows in your house, you can consider replacing your traditional picture window, the kind with a square of glass flanked by two narrow, double hung windows with something more mid-century that might be a triple panel of fixed glass panes above and small awning or Hopper Windows below.
Or if your picture window looks out at the backyard, replace the window with a sliding glass door if you’re learning from what other people have done before. Let’s get into a couple of specific examples, four, one, if you’re short on bathroom space. This is a hugely common mid-century house problem. Most builder grade MCM houses had one shared bathroom for the whole family and guests. People today don’t love that as much.
So if you’re short on bathroom space and looking for MCM remodeling ideas to help you address the problem, you might want to do what a lot of other people have done by adding one in the basement. It’s actually the easiest place to add a bathroom is in an unfinished basement. It’s counterintuitive, but jack hammering up a concrete floor and then re pouring the concrete after you add plumbing is actually easier than working around finished space on main levels and then having to connect piping through a basement below. This is exactly what I did in my own home. The original basement was unfinished. It had what’s known as a diaper toilet in the laundry area. This toilet you often find free standing in an unfinished basement space.
Other people will say the origin is because it was the easiest, cheapest plumbing fixture that could be put in so that the plumbing system could be tested for code. But I’ve heard that it was used often for the lady of the house to rinse and flush the contents of cloth diapers before loading them into her modern washing machine. You can tag off of that plumbing. I do this on so many mid-century renovations that I plan when we are finishing part or all of a basement, creating a den, adding an egress window for a guest or teenager bedroom.
We also want to get a functional bathroom in on that lower level. So by connecting to the plumbing of the washing machine and the diaper toilet, we can easily introduce a new bath pretty much anywhere that suits us, within the basement, and easily increase the resale value of the house and its usability with one quick move. Here’s another example of learning from what’s come before. Let’s talk about kitchens. The problems with mid-century kitchens are so universal.
Before the mid-century home, as we talked about last season, the kitchen was still largely a free standing affair. There would be a range a sink and a refrigerator, but no counters or wall hung cabinets. Instead, there would be a storage unit, like a Hoosier cupboard and a table with chairs that served as both prep and dining service. The idea of the efficient kitchen was coming along before the mid-century Ranch, if you remember that book and movie, Cheaper by the Dozen, the mother in that story, Lillian Galbraith, was an industrial psychologist and engineer.
At first, she worked with her husband, but she continued to work and invent long after his death, and she coined the term the work triangle, that functional space between the fridge, the stove and the sink. The work triangle defines a space where no leg of the triangle should be less than four feet too cramped or more than nine too many steps. And this idea at the time was revolutionary. It was intended and did reduce the workload of the cook. Usually, Mom, it isn’t as applicable today, though, as it was when Galbraith invented it, the way we cook has changed a lot.
We no longer start from an unplugged chicken or a basket of tomatoes. Meal prep takes less time and is more likely to be undertaken by more than one person than it was in the past. Breakfast used to be eggs, bacon, hash browns, now it’s a bowl of cereal and a coffee and a bar grabbed on the way out the drawer. The way we cook is also more individualized. Some families really like to make meals from scratch as a recreational activity. Others just want a place for the Keurig to stand in glory and an oven to keep the pizza box warm. These two hypothetical extremes want very different kitchens, but the mid-century kitchen is incredibly consistent in nearly all cases.
An MCM kitchen, whether a galley or a full room, is a space where the three basic elements, the fridge, the range and the sink, are set into base cabinets against walls with upper cabinets above them, anywhere there isn’t a window or a door. This usually means that every work surface in a mid-century kitchen requires you to turn your back on the room and probably look at a cabinet door less than 12 inches from your face. It’s not great, not great for lighting and not great for work surfaces, and if anyone else is in the room with you, you’ve got to turn your back on them to get things done. So what can be. About it, depending on the dimensions you’re playing with.
You can remove wall cabinets and slide in a narrow island. You can expand the kitchen with a small addition, or you can blow out an interior wall between the kitchen and a living space in order to set up a peninsula style double sided counter. I’m going to be teaching more about solving specific kitchen problems and a Facebook live next week, so follow me over to camera three for that fun. Then let’s see. Here’s another common mid-century ranch problem. Despite the concept of indoor, outdoor living, most ranches aren’t very well connected to their yards. They often have just one door at the front and one near the kitchen on the side or the back.
But this problem has been solved since with a nearly infinite selection of additions out in all directions. In an early, mid-century neighborhood like mine, you can read the story of homeowner creativity in the Google Maps. So when my neighborhood was built, each house was a very slight variation on a 28 foot by 40 foot rectangle. There was a house with maybe a single car garage, either attached or nearby. They all have the same rough interior layout, kitchen, dining room, living room on one side, family bath and two to three bedrooms on the other. Today, a fly overview shows a few untouched examples of this layout and countless variations of L shape, U shape and Z shape additions projecting out. Garages have been expanded, living rooms and master bedrooms added off the back. Breezeway is converted into three season deck additions. The list goes on.
The sturdy, simple construction of a mid-century ranch actually were intended to make it really easy to add on to the best effect can be achieved by pushing out towards the back to either add a more generous master suite or a backyard connecting family space. But really, the possibilities are infinite. So if you’re puzzling over how to add onto your ranch, you’re looking for MCM remodeling ideas for your home, you don’t have to figure it out on your own, just switch to Google Earth view on your map app.
To recap, if you are looking for MCM remodeling ideas to solve the challenges of your mid-century home. You’ve got two great resources at your fingertips. You can dive back into the origins of mid-century design, or you can just check out what other people have done to solve the same problem for their mid mod houses. And don’t worry, you don’t need to go knocking on the doors of random strangers to ask about their best MCM remodeling ideas to share. I’ve got you covered. I’ve been putting together a collection of my favorite mid-century homeowner led remodel accounts on Instagram.
I’ve organized them all into an Instagram guide where you can see them each in one place and then go follow each one individually. As I’ve said before on the podcast, you can train the inscrutable algorithms of social media to show you what I assume you want, lovely mid-century inspiration and MCM remodeling ideas. You do that by following accounts that are full of just that. So head over to my Instagram at mid mod Midwest and tap on the guides icon to find that list or get the link in today’s show notes, an even more hands on resource for MCM remodeling ideas and layout troubleshooting is Facebook groups.
I’m not wild about Facebook itself, but the topic specific groups can be amazing. Check out the mid mod remodel Facebook community and the plethora of other great mid-century homeowner groups out there. You can post pictures of your house with questions that you need answered and get them answered by other people who care as much about mid-century design and homes as you do.