Julie Andrews said it best – the very beginning; a very good place to start.
In fact, if you start your remodel planning anywhere other than HERE it will take longer, feel more chaotic, be more stressful and likely end up more expensive.
And for us, the ABC or do-rey-me of a remodel is you. Your own life. Your family. The way you want to feel at home.
I work with clients crafting a perfect retreat from the world…And also for families who believe the more the merrier. I kicked off a master plan yesterday for a couple who casually dropped that they might regularly host 25 or so. people Maybe 60 for a big event!
Let’s talk about starting your remodel plan from the right place – your own life. Your choices. Your priorities.
So let’s focus on the start:
You’ll plan and prioritize a different remodel if you want a house filled with little pockets to let everyone have their own quiet space versus a house that brings anyone and everyone together.
I’m going to start you off with a short and sweet overview of why ANY remodel effort needs more than a floor plan -it needs this master plan approach. This episode from back in 2021 was – I think – the first time I introduced the FIVE D concept of a master plan. Dream, Discover Distill Draft and Develop. So I have been saying this for five years now and I still absolutely stand by it.
From there I want to remind you of a fun and easy mental exercise you can and should tackle at the start of your planning … or any time you feel like you’re loosing the plot in yoru plans. I originally shared this with my Ready to Remodel Students.
Then I’ll wrap up by sharing an interview ep – really more of a recorded chat with my own little little sister about her remodel planning journey and my best advice for her.
If you ever wondered what I’d tell my nearest and dearest about planning a remodel …this is it right here.
If thinking about the master plan method gets you feeling excited to start on your own masterplanning journey … now is a great time to reach out and schedule a call to talk about working with Mid Mod Midwest. Or to jump right into planning at your own pace guided by my tried and true Homeowner support program, REady to Remdoel. Our next office hours call will be ___
To pull these all together we’re going to call this episode 2120. Go find show notes and all the links, posts, references and images right here:
Episode 601
Episode 807
Episode 602
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
Julie Andrews said it best. Let’s start at the very beginning, a very good place to start. And if you begin your remodel anywhere other than here, it will take longer, feel more chaotic and likely end up more expensive for us, the ABC or the DO RE MI of a remodel is you your own life, your family the way you all feel at home. I work with clients for whom crafting a perfect retreat from the world is everything, and also for people who believe the more the merrier. Yesterday, I kicked off a master plan for a couple who casually dropped that they might regularly host 25 or so, maybe 60 for a big event.
So let’s talk about starting your remodel from the right place, your own life, your choices and priorities. Hey there. Welcome back to mid mod remodel. This is a show about updating MCM homes, helping you match a mid century home to your modern life. I’m your host. Della Hansmann, architect and mid century ranch enthusiast. You’re listening to Episode 2120 before we get into that, I want to let you know that I am taking July off from recording the podcast this summer, but that doesn’t mean you have to.
In fact, I’m pretty excited about what I’ve got planned for you. I took a dip through our deep archives. Did you know we have over 250 episodes recorded, and pulled together some throwbacks that have great content but might be so far in the past in your podcast feed that you’re unlikely ever to hit them, which there I only have one or two podcasts that I’ve listened to every single episode of. So for the next four weeks, I’ve chosen some fun episode pairings from the past that will take us on a little spin through the Master Plan method.
Sit back and relax and get ready to be inspired to do a little more for your home and for yourself. Today, we’re focused on starting in the right place. And I want to begin with a short and sweet overview of why any remodel effort needs more than a floor plan. It needs this master plan approach.
This episode from back in 2021 was, I think, the first time I introduced the 5d concept of a master plan, dream, discover, to sell, draft and develop. So I’ve been saying this for five years now, and I absolutely still stand by it. From there, I’m going to remind you of a fun and easy mental exercise you can and should tackle at the start of your planning. Or come back to anytime you feel like you’ve lost the plot in your plans. I originally shared this with some of my ready to remodel students, but I think you’ll find it really helpful as well.
And then I will wrap up by sharing an interview episode, really more of a recorded chat with my own little sister about her remodel planning journey at its start, and my best advice for her, if you ever wondered what I would tell my nearest and dearest about planning a remodel, this is it right there. If thinking about the Master Plan method gets you excited to start on your own mid century master planning journey, now is a great time to reach out and schedule a call to talk about working with mid mod Midwest for us to plan your remodel, or to jump right into planning at your own pace, guided by my tried and true homeowner Support Program ready to remodel.
When you join right now, you’ll have a whole month to get up to speed on the program before our next scheduled Office Hours call on August 4, you can find information about that, plus the show notes with the links, posts and references for all three of these best of the past episodes at today’s show notes page, mid mod midwest.com/ 2120 today, and really for the rest of this season, we’re going to talk about the Master Plan method for home remodeling, what it is, what it isn’t. It’s really shocking to me how few people use these steps to plan their home remodel, given how many problems it creates when you don’t have a big picture plan in mind.
Before you update, I want to talk to you about the unusual way I work with my clients and the amazing results that I know they get by using this method. Having a master plan is more than pinning a bunch of things you like. It’s more than having the furnace guy and the roofing guy come out and say, Oh yeah, your home inspector was right. That’s got to be replaced plan for a remodel. And it’s more than having a perfectly tidy, organized blueprint for your house.
A master plan is your guide for the entire trip. It’s a travel book you create for yourself, a master plan. Can’t guarantee perfect success, Inexpensiveness and timeliness. Nothing can, but it will smooth every step of your remodel process. I believe no homeowner should remodel without one, and it’s what I create for every one of my clients. It’s also what I teach people to create for themselves in my ready to remodel online program, this takes people through every step they need to plan a perfect MCM remodel.
And I wanted to let you know that what’s happening behind the scenes in my business right now is that we are planning to relaunch that program this fall. I’m so excited about that happening, but today we’re going to talk about why you might want to master plan your remodel and the elements that make up a great master plan process. This will work for you, whether your goal is to get everything on your remodel done as quickly as possible, or whether you want to tackle your first project right now and be comfortable in the notion that you have your plans squared away for the next year, the year after that, and the year your kid goes to kindergarten or leaves the nest. Because you have your master plan. So sit back and close your eyes or grab a notebook, because today we’re going to talk about the how’s, the whys and the what’s of the master planning process.
By the way, if you know someone who’s been struggling with their remodeling plans and you think they could use some help and advice, send this episode to them. This is the Hello, welcome. Intro episode that sets the framework for basically everything I do, and talk about season one of mid mod remodel podcast was two years ago now, and I used that also as a sort of an overview process of all of the philosophies that I have around mid century remodeling. My philosophies haven’t changed, but the step by step approach I use with dozens of clients and custom design work updating their mid century homes, and with hundreds of MCM homeowners who reached out to me for advice and guidance through social media, has become more streamlined, and that’s why I want to readdress it today.
So before we go into further into the idea of a master plan and why I think it’s so special and important and unusual, I should say that from a certain point of view, everyone who remodels has a master plan of sorts. It might just not be very clear, helpful or well thought out. Their master plan might be as simple as I will make. Every decision on the fly, or I don’t know, my contractor will decide, or I have 47 boards on Pinterest, and when I am asked at the last minute to pick all the door handles for the house, I will race and comb through every one of them until I find that door handle I liked four months ago. Oh, shoot, was that on Instagram instead? Ah, like I say, everyone managing a remodel has some mechanism in place to make their decisions and direct the flow of the remodel. They’ll have a way to choose each finish, to decide on the layout, to pick the people they’ll work with. But some of those unspoken, unwritten master plans, as you might have guessed from my tone, aren’t the best way to tackle a project as complex, expensive and important as your home update for the best, most cost effective outcome, the one you love the most, the one which requires the least amount of time and stress on your part, you need a fully fleshed out master plan like the one we’re going to talk about in this episode.
My great grandmother and namesake was fond of pithy Midwestern aphorisms. As grandma Della used to say, a stitch in time saves nine, and she was right plan now for a better outcome in the future. Let’s put it another way. There are some of the decisions you’ll make for yourself during the process. I recommend to build a master plan that would be made at any point in a remodel, no matter what you do. I’m just proposing that you make them once upfront, or even several times in the early stages as you narrow your focus, but that you make them at the beginning of your process when you’re feeling open ended, open minded and free, rather than under the stressful conditions of a construction deadline.
Part of what I do for people is simply to ask them to make their necessary future choices in advance. But some of what comes under the heading of my master plan method is the time and space to dig a little deeper on your dreams and ask yourself some of the often overlooked questions, that’s where there’s really potential for magic. If you ask yourself those questions that too many people overlook, you can set yourself up for a home update that is fundamentally different, not just easier, cheaper and less stressful than the one you would have had without those steps. So let’s take a moment to just define master plan.
The dictionary says it’s a comprehensive or far reaching plan of action. You’ve probably heard it in daily life, as described for big picture, large reaching projects, a five year plan for a university campus, a master plan for city redevelopment. It basically means anything that covers long term growth and takes the time to analyze the situation before diving into solutions.
From my point of view, a simple explanation of the master plan is that as the outline of all the decisions you’re going to make during the course of your remodel, bolstered and reinforced by the reasoning behind those decisions, your why, why your family might need a different solution than someone else, why your particular house needs a little more or less work in some areas than a typical one, and why your personal style leads you to choose one item or another. Then there’s the what, all of the various things you’d like to see happen during the course of your remodel. Set down at the beginning. That’s the process.
The magic comes from your why. Because those why things underpin everything else, and when you inevitably have to make some decisions on the fly, change your mind, address a new situation, you’ll be able to make them with confidence and stick to your guns if needed, because you know the reasoning behind your choices, not just that. You pick them out on a whim. I also wanted to address who a master plan is for.
I would say anyone who plans to remodel now or in the future needs a master plan. It’s a useful and effective tool for people who want the most efficient possible process to start now and get it done as quickly as they can, especially under these pandemic conditions. And it’s also valuable for people who want to start on one part and break up the rest of the plan. Plan into several years. It’s even useful for someone who’s feeling so swamped and at sea by their remodel process. They don’t know what their budget should be. They don’t have the money saved up for the plan now, but they simply want to be set in good stead so they can start planning for a remodel they have no intention of beginning now, but want to undertake in a few years when their finances are all in line. The transformation I see in my clients during the Master Plan process is so satisfying.
Clients come to me saying, We’ve been meaning to remodel for years, but just don’t know where to start. We’re overwhelmed, and by the time the process is complete, they’re excited and energized. They often tell me which contractor they’re planning to call next week so they can start getting their ducks in a row. I love watching this happen. And speaking of contractors, you can also do your future contractor a favor by coming to them with a master plan. Look, contractors sometimes get a bad rap from architects and homeowners alike.
Now, I can’t speak for every contractor in the United States, but on balance, in my experience, I find that general and subcontractors are great folks. They’re talented, hard working, organized craftsmen who are genuinely interested in getting the best outcome for their clients. But here’s the thing, they don’t have the training or the time, especially right now, to take their clients through a detailed, introspective planning process. So a contractor will try to do you a favor by telling you that, yes, he does kitchens and even has an in house draft person who can draw up plans. I hope you hear my air quotes here.
That’s great. I actually love when my clients pair up with a contractor like this after we’ve gone through the master planning process, because they can get inexpensive, drafted plans to demonstrate everything that we’ve designed together. But if you jump over the design process straight from, hey, I want a kitchen remodel to the skills of an unknown in house drafts person who happens to have access to AutoCAD in their office computer, you are not going to be taking the time to consider what your house could be or to tailor it for your life and your needs.
So with a master plan, the best case scenario is this, working with a designer to create your own goals just makes your contractor’s life easier. When you can clearly communicate to them what you want, they’ll be sure they’re going to give you a result you love. If we look at the worst case remodeling scenarios, these are both possible when you go into a contract or relationship blind, without comparing multiple bids and without having firm plans in hand. In a few cases, you’ll encounter an actual bad faith relationship, a hard to work with person who doesn’t actually care about getting you the result that you want, or the saddest outcome, there’s a disconnect between what you can communicate.
You’re not really telling them what you want, and they are making incorrect assumptions about what that is, and the end result is something that neither you nor they wanted to happen. That’s a tragedy, and it can be avoided with good planning and design. So what are the essential steps of the master plan process? I’ve summed them up into a simple, alliterative framework, the 5d framework for design. We’re going to spend this whole season talking about it one way or another, but today I’ll give you the gist. You should start planning your remodel by turning your mind inward. This is the dream phase. This is where you get to figure out what you really want out of your remodel. Because people want to remodel for more than the latest Chinese kitchen tile.
The odds are you want to update your home because it’s feeling too small, not encouraging the lifestyle you want, adding up maintenance hassles one after another, or just failing to make your life better. Get to your underlying whys, and you’ll be able to set up a remodel that costs less and that you love more. Next, you need to discover what’s going on in the house you have right now. This is your chance to become the expert in your home and what it needs, because no contractor, home inspector or even architect can ever know your house better than you do yourself. Pull together enough information, and you’ll have the confidence to become the team lead on your remodel so that it turns out the way you want it to, not the way that seems best to your plumber, your dad or the folks on HGTV, as you do all of that, you get to have some real fun. It’s time to distill your personal mid century style from all those hours spent scrolling social media.
This is where you create a style guide for the house to keep your choices in check and lined with your values, put all of your Instagram and Pinterest scrolling to work for you by rolling it up into a clear, cohesive plan for the style of your home that will ensure that the final result looks polished, intentional, and creates the vibe you want, plus saves you the stress of hassle of a million I am not exaggerating choices of faucets, handles, flooring and colors by setting parameters that help you focus your option and make Each choice only once. At that point, it’s time to draft the possibilities that you want to actually take on in your home note. This isn’t the time to start drawing a floor plan in pen or carving it in stone. The draft phase is about opening up and considering your options, as much as it is about deciding on outcomes.
This is where you get to pick from and improve. On current home updates that are common to mid century houses and that other mid century homeowners have used in the past. You don’t have to start from scratch. There are 15 million mid century ranch houses across the US, and they’ve all needed updating to match lifestyles a lot like yours. Learn from the mistakes and successes of other people, planning home updates like yours and figure out what’s going to work best for you and your house.
Finally, you’ll develop all of the work you’ve done above into your master plan, pulling together your choices into an easy to access document that sets the scale, phases, budget and methods you’ll use for your remodel. Because a remodel is such a complex machine, you need to have a roadmap to take you from start to finish and pulling together your entire bucket list into an organized plan with priorities logically grouped into projects and phases will help you budget, communicate and execute then love your great remodel this year or over the next decade.
The work doesn’t stop there. Your master plan is a living document that will help you see a little way into the future and also make it easier to roll with any changes that come up as you grow into new ideas, hit road bumps in the process, or just evolve into your fully fleshed out dreams. But if you take the time for all these steps as you plan your remodel, I know that the outcome will be immeasurably better for you and for your home. Those steps one more time, were dream, discover, distill, draft and develop.
All right, today’s podcast episode is actually a lesson that I’m adding to the program this time around, because I want to make it easier for people to plan and stick to their plan as they go through a long home remodel, possibly a months long process of taking it all on at one time, and possibly it might be a many years long process of doing one part of the house and then another and another. In that case, you definitely want to have access to some inner strength, some motivation, some pull you through the tough times, reasons for why you want to take on your remodel. So let’s get into it.
One of the first things that I ask people to take on when they start to plan a remodel is not to think about what they want to change in their house or what they want their remodel to look like, but to think about what they want their house to feel like when they’re done this, dreaming about your ideal home moment in the process is incredibly powerful, and it helps people to really see the bigger picture and detach themselves from a particular finish or solution or necessary step before that even happens.
Though, I think there is a benefit to talking about why you want to remodel in the first place. We’ll talk about the actual exercise I want to suggest to you in a minute. But basically it has two incredible benefits. First, it will help you determine what is the right remodel for you, and you can use it to keep yourself on track all the way along as you struggle with a particular weighing one object over another, one part of the house coming first or getting more of your budget than another, you can come back to your original why exercise? And you might have an easy answer to that question when you look at it from that point of view.
And second, it will help you stay motivated to get started, to keep going and to finish strong on your remodel plans. Now, sometimes getting started is the hardest part, so let me ask you this, how long have you been thinking about the changes you want to make to your home? Now it might be you’ve been thinking about them since you moved in. How long ago was that? What’s been holding you back? There are so many challenges, so many friction points before you get started on a remodel, time, money, decisions to make agreement with your spouse, figuring out where you could live while you decommissioned part of your house, the doubts of your family, friends or neighbors, the list goes on and on.
In order to push back on all those impediments to your remodeling progress, you need a big, powerful motivational tool. You need to know your why. So how can you establish that? Let’s go through a simple exercise to help you establish what the why of your remodel might be. This is actually going to be so straightforward that I think you might be able to do it while you listen to this episode. So grab a pen and a notebook or open up a Google document and get started right now, I’m going to credit this exercise to the place that I heard it first, which was from Amy Porterfield on her online marketing Made Easy podcast, just like you are listening to this podcast to get concepts and ideas and inspiration for planning your home remodel, I have all the ideas in the world about mid century homes, and I need inspiration and advice about running a small business.
So one of the people I turn to is Amy Porterfield. She recently established this fantastic focus exercise for how to set your goals and how to set the motivation behind your goals. Here is the three step process in a nutshell. Step one is a brain dump exercise. I want you to write down all of the various reasons you might be thinking about planning your remodel. I’m not talking about what you want. To Do When you update your home I’m talking about what you will feel, how your life will change, what you will get out of it when your home remodel is complete.
This might include that you have space to do your favorite activity. It might mean that you suddenly have separation between your work life and your home life. This is a challenge that I wonder about in my own life. It might mean that you’ve got a place now to hang out with your kids, where before you had too much of a formal living room or a den that was far away down in the dark basement.
Now you’ve got a place where the family can gather that’s central to your home life. It might mean that you achieved the sense of satisfaction and having adulted your way into home ownership success, it might mean that when your remodel is done, one of the key things you wanted to do was bring in new windows, you’re going to suddenly live your life in the sunlight every day will be brighter and therefore happier. You might just feel like this has been on your list for too long, and when you are done, you will know that you’ve completed a project. Anywhere on that list you’re looking for the ideas, the things that are meaningful to you. And you don’t have to be thinking too hard about this. I want you to spit ball. It might be something you choose to sit down and do with your partner.
So if you’re listening to this episode alone, make a note of this. This is an easy 123, you actually don’t even need to write it down. You can remember this and say it to them over dinner this evening. Why do you want to remodel and make this list pretty long? Take five minutes and spitball all of the reasons you can think of, or keep a post it note handy all day long, and just write down ideas as they come to you.
So far, so good. All right, once you’ve got your list, take a breath, then look at it again. All of the reasons you just wrote down are good reasons, but not all of them are equally important to you. So what you want you to do is re evaluate that list, anything that rings hollow, anything that’s not actually going to get you out of bed in the morning, remodeling, anything that’s not going to help you pick up the phone and call a contractor strike. It Back off the list. Boil your reasons down to the real essential why? Why you want to kick off this remodel?
Give these ideas some heft, because this is what’s going to power you through all of the fun and challenges that come ahead. And then step three is so easy. Put those reasons that really matter to you. Someplace they’ll be visible. Stick them to your mirror on a post it. Write them on the wall in your office, stick them on the refrigerator with a magnet. Remind yourself early and often that you want to get this remodel going. You want to keep this remodel going. And here’s why, the answers are going to be up to you.
So that’s really going to be a powerful incentive to you, something that motivates you, something that gets you excited, something you can share with other people, although perhaps some of your whys might not be something you want to share. They might be personal. That’s fine too. Your real reasons are going to be the most powerful incentives for you to make this remodel happen. But this exercise for you is actually going to have two benefits.
One of them is motivational, and it’s going to be how you get going and see yourself through the tough times in a remodel. But actually, you can take this exercise with you into the work that you do. As you start to go through the Master Plan method, as you craft your ideal home profile, you’re going to think about your why of your remodel, your goals for the remodel, and then think about what your dream home looks like based on that. This may sound like a no brainer, but it’s so often overlooked.
And what I want you to do is to make sure that the remodel you take on and execute is the remodel you’ve been dreaming of, that it does the things you dreamed it could do. And actually this is so easy to lose sight of in the chaos of decision making and budget and Value Engineering, you can return to these Whys again and again. Use them as part of your decision making rubric. Anytime you have to make a choice between one thing and another, between prioritizing one thing over another, choosing a finish, choosing to spend more or less, choosing to get one part of the process done early or later. Use your why to determine it.
Here’s an example of how things spin out of control. You might find that you chose to plan your remodel because the most important thing your house doesn’t do for you right now, and what you want more than anything is a place for everyone to gather. You want your family and your friends to come to your house and to have the most welcoming social space so that you can be the host or hostess with the most so that’s your why. And then as you start to go down the path of the remodel, that little tweak you wanted to make in the owner suite starts to loom larger and larger. The contractor is throwing cool, expensive ideas at you, and you’re realizing that fixing the plumbing in that space is going to be expensive. It starts to feel like that is a really fun project and needs to happen with a sense of urgency, and it starts to consume all of your attention and your time.
And suddenly you realize, when you look back at your why that is not going to bring your friends to your house. So there’s two ways to answer that question. There. Perhaps what you realize is that you were also in need of a sanctuary space, and you need to adjust your why. That’s fine. This we’re not setting things in stone here. You can change your reasoning for what’s motivating you to get going with this project. But I suspect that when you look back at your initial why for the remodel, it may actually help you say, Oh, this owner suite improvement is going to be fantastic, but it’s also going to happen two years from now, when we’ve budgeted again, because the most important thing to us, the reason we took on this remodel in the first place, was to create a social center for our friends and family.
That kind of decision making may seem simple in the cold light of this podcast, but is incredibly challenging in the heat of the moment. So having something you can return to again and again and make those decisions easier is such a valuable thing. All right, so have you started to think about your why, if you didn’t grab a pencil? Did you start to have ideas pop in your head? I want you to capture them now. Make up that list, and if you don’t mind it, I would love you to share with me your why, why you want to plan a remodel for your mid century home. Send me a DM on Instagram or reply to the email announcing this podcast. I’d love to hear from you.
One of the most important and overlooked aspects of remodeling today is that you can personalize your home. And when I say that, I’m not talking about changing the color of a tile in your bathroom from blue, which you hate, to green, which you love, although sure do that, I’m talking about adjusting the house. Sometimes it’s very layout and structure to meet the particular needs and preferences of you and your family.
So much of what you see on HGTV or in shelter magazines is just another cookie cutter update that includes making a standard house more luxurious or bringing it up to date in cookie cutter ways. If you are going to take the time and spend the money and live through the stress of a home remodel, I want you to end up with a house that makes your dreams come true. For a perfect example of what I mean by that.
Today, I’m going to chat with my little sister, who’s been busily customizing her new home almost since the last time we spoke to her on the podcast last fall. Last week, I introduced those essential steps of the master plan process, summed up into a simple, alliterative framework, the 5d design framework, the first one, the dreaming stage, is the one that most commonly gets skipped entirely in a conventional remodel process. And look, I can see why it feels extraneous to take the time for it. You look around and see finished remodels, you think you know what you need, and you don’t have time to waste. The contractor says they’re ready to go. All you need is a plan.
But actually, this moment, right at the start of the project, is where the whole thing can go wrong before you even begin. Think about it this way, if you were about to get into a car to start a trip, you might already be running late. You want to get going, so you pile in, steer out of your driveway and head off at your top legal speed. But did you map your route? You won’t end up where you want to be faster if you picked the wrong option, and if your directions are off by too much, you won’t end up where you wanted to go at all.
Think about it. You know this dreaming time is worth it. In the lifespan of your home, you’ll sleep there, wake up there, and spend most of every day being affected by the space around you. So ask yourself, What does my home really mean to me? Is the house helping me live my best life or making each day a little harder? What do I need to change about my home and what do I want to change? Above all, keep asking, Why? Why do this? Why take on the trouble and disruption? When you ask yourself these questions, you might come up with some surprising thoughts about what to do with your house.
When you take that time to ask what your house is doing for you versus what you wish it could do, you might just end up thinking outside the box and creatively tailoring it to the life you want to live. Now this is advice I give all the time. So on one hand, I’m not surprised that my brilliant little sister listened, took it and ran with it when she got her first home late last year. But as she always does, she’s really taken it beyond my expectations. I’m so impressed with how confidently she and her husband have been modifying their new mid century home to perfectly fit their lifestyle.
The first choices they made were largely made with furniture when they decided to keep the TV out of their main floor living area by creating a beautiful reading and audio room in the classic mid century combo entry living space at the front of the house, they took her husband’s big Sports TV and made a space for it in the basement, so now they have high quality movie sports evening space when they want, and they can completely walk away from it when they don’t. As a result, they’ve created a low key evening routine of sitting on comfortable mid century furniture every evening, snuggling their cats, listening to records on the Hi Fi and reading books, just as they always wished to, but struggled to make happen when they lived in a one bedroom apartment with a TV right in the center of their living space.
But that’s just the beginning. Their next plan involves a surprising choice for the den addition from the 60s at the back. Of their house, leaning into the dream phase of planning has really helped them to brainstorm the perfect solution for that space, because all the steps of the five day framework are interlinked. We won’t only stick the dream phase in our chat. KJ also talks about her process of discovering the house. She’s been working diligently to make herself more familiar with the ins and outs of homeownership and learning more with each call for pricing to a subcontractor about how she’ll manage, first, some small projects and later some bigger home improvement undertakings.
And you can listen in while I twist her arm to sign her up for a master plan. She needs one, and she hasn’t got it yet. As always, you’ll find show notes with links to the references I make and an outline of this conversation on my website at mid mod midwest.com/ 602, we’re going to chat about some layout things in the interview. So if that seems mysterious, check out the show notes for sketches of the floor plans, so you can visualize what we’re talking about. And I’ll also include some photos without further ado. Here’s that chat.
Della Hansmann
So it’s been about, what, half a year? No, it’s been almost a year since we last checked in with my sister, who at that time was in what I described as the exciting Zillow phase of her house hunt. And in that time, she’s found a house, bought it. Yeah, she got her first offer, accepted. We’ll ask about that. And she’s been slowly but surely making herself at home in the new house. Hey, KJ, we’re sitting in the basement of your new house. We are sitting in the basement of my new house. You’ve got some comfortable furniture in here. It does not have the Ratty carpet it had when you bought it. Instead, it has
KJ
what it has cork, at the suggestion of my sister, we have waterproof cork. That was quick lock installed and actually kind of a fun project.
Della Hansmann
Yeah, that was, I mean, that’s not the first thing you’ve ever done with power tools, certainly. But it was kind of this. The first project the basement floor was accomplished during the height of the pandemic, when neither I nor my dad could come over and help. So you’re really flying without a net there. In terms of home improvement projects, I was impressed.
KJ
A lot of phone calls, a lot of taking photos of things and saying, How do I unlock this or get this into
Della Hansmann
shape? You’ve put in new flooring in several places, you’ve painted, you’ve assembled some fun, new and vintage furniture pieces that you didn’t have before. And I think the biggest project that has been accomplished slash is being accomplished right now is the addition from the 1960s era at the back of the house. Oh, first, tell us a little bit about the house.
KJ
So the house was built in 1952 it’s a mid century ranch. Go figure on Madison’s north side. It’s super cute, and it’s perfect location. So one of the things I talked about last time was that I was looking at a very specific location near my work at the clinic that I work at. We also liked it because it had a walking distance grocery store library branch. We spent this last summer going to the club league baseball games here in Madison, and had just a blast being able to walk to do that, because they are a drinking event.
KJ
And you can hear them from your backyard. We can figure them from our backyard too. Yeah, it’s been great. But yeah, we looked at about four to five houses in this neighborhood. None of them felt quite right. We were almost close to putting in an offer on one or two of them before this and then this one came up, and we liked the way it looked. It was on, you know, one of the streets that we thought of as sort of our ideal go to streets. And when we got inside of it, we thought, Yes, this could work. We put in an aggressive offer, and it got accepted. So we got this house. It was our first offer. It was accepted with very minimal back and forth. And it’s been kind of a dream ever since we love it. We’re so happy to be
Della Hansmann
here. I’m so happy for you. I have to admit, honestly, I was not only impressed that you got the first house you offered for I was a little annoyed, but you
KJ
had told me it was going to be hard, and I proved you wrong with my determination. You
Della Hansmann
did willpower. So you know, little sister, one upmanship strikes again. I’m very proud of you, and you’ve been making the place your own. Your husband has been focused on the yard and been finding himself a landscape gardener. All of a sudden,
KJ
we have monarch butterflies that visit our yard, and bumblebees. We are working on making a pollinator friendly habitat, and he is becoming a pro at it. So it’s, it’s been, also been great.
Della Hansmann
That’s fun to watch. So the reason I wanted to talk to you today was this interesting 1960s edition. So the house is just a two bedroom. Originally, previous owner had fit in a bedroom in the basement with an egress window. And you guys aren’t big, grandiose bedroom people. When you bought the house, this back edition was fitted out as sort of like a den slash man cave. It has original, late 60s dark paneling walls and a sort of a semi, custom semi homeowner built entertainment unit along one wall, and as I mentioned, also in the basement, really gross, ratty carpeting, which you in. You didn’t tear it out right away, but it got torn out as soon as you could manage. Yes, I think what’s interesting to me about that space is that to anyone else, the obvious use for it would be to keep using it as a den, to have the front room as sort of a formal living room, and the back as a den. Or if you wanted to be a little more ambitious, you could remodel it as a master bedroom, and it’s very common to have a master bedroom addition off the back of the house, actually, with a little bit more design thinking, we brainstormed both a really unusual and a really perfect solution for that space. So you want to tell us what’s going to happen in that room.
KJ
So it’s this great room right now, and I mean that in a lot of ways, one in that it has a large footprint, and so we certainly could have left it like that, but it also sort of tucks in around our garage, fits right into it. So currently our attached garage, we enter into the original footprint of the house, into this very tiny, narrow hallway with a doorway down to the basement, a doorway in the opposite direction to the addition and a doorway straight ahead into the kitchen.
Della Hansmann
Yeah, the hallway has four doors in a three foot by four foot space.
KJ
It’s tiny and cramped, and when we come in, there’s nowhere to set things down or take off our muddy, snowy, salt, grimy boots in the winter, which was when we moved in. And so we were frustrated with it right off the bat. And so what we want to do, actually, is create a mud room space in our addition. So our plan is to cut in a door on sort of the 90 degrees opposite wall, walking straight into the addition from the garage, rather than turning it to the side of the garage and walking into the original footprint of the house. So we’ll walk into that space and essentially then divide the addition lengthwise, 1/3 two thirds, so that the third that’s looking at our backyard, you know, the house forms an L and makes this cute little nook around our patio. We look into our shared neighbor’s backyard, and we’ve gotten really close with them. It’s actually super fun.
KJ
We’re going to put more windows on that side, calling it sort of the bird watching room. It’ll be more open and light and airy and bright, and a place for us to sit, maybe eat breakfast, relax in the afternoons and read, and then the other two thirds of the room, where the door will be that will come in from the garage. We’re going to treat us sort of this mud room, bike storage room, tool room, where we can carry in and out the heavy equipment that we need to work on projects in the house, or my husband, Kevin, loves riding bikes. He’s getting me into buying more bikes, although that’s a challenge in the pandemic.
KJ
And so we’ll have it as a space to work on those and all weather store them safely. We might cut another door in on the far side of the addition so that we can have straight in and out access from there too. But it’ll just all of a sudden, we’ll have all of the storage space we need for everything we want to be doing in the yard or out and about activities here in the house comfortably, and that space to walk in, not be kicking cats out of the way, not be getting mud all right into the kitchen right away, and then transition into our house in a much smooth, much more pleasant way. We’re really excited about it. We really want to try to get at least some of it, at least some of it, at least the door part, done before the winter, because it was so unpleasant last winter to always be sort of tripping into the kitchen every time we came home. But we’re really excited about it.
Della Hansmann
Yeah, and I, I’m just delighted with this. I think it is the perfect example of tailoring a house to fit your own life, because you don’t need to be bound by what a space was before or what for resale value might be again, these are the things that you’re missing from your lives. You guys are obsessed with your yard and with birds and having a space where you can really appreciate that none of the other windows in the house, the kitchen, the bathroom, the bedroom, can realistically be expanded to be a wonderful bird watching space.
Della Hansmann
The other thing that the House didn’t have for you was a place to obviously make bike mecca for Kevin, and I think another, another choice might have been to run that down into the basement. People often think of basement as more unfinished space, a lower quality space, and that’s where you’d do gritty things like bike maintenance, but from an ease of access point of view, that’s not as good running bikes down the stairs into your mechanical space back here would be pretty inconvenient, and you’d already taken steps to fit up this basement as your cozy TV watching den, because when you watch TV, You really love too, and when you’re not watching TV, you want it completely gone from your lives. So these two parts of your life that are so important, the bird watching and the bike working, didn’t have a home in your house, and you had this big extra space. Rather than buying a whole bunch of living room furniture to fit out a third sitting space, you came up with this great solution. Let’s talk about a little bit about the design process, how we got there.
KJ
I will be the first to admit I have yet to have Della make me a mid century solutions package, and I regret it deeply, because I wish we had a master plan. We need one to figure out when. Things are gonna happen. What all needs to happen when we do each project, the addition feels like enough of its own space that I think it’s what we’re doing there will fit with the other tentative ideas we have with the rest of the house. When we start thinking about, what are we gonna do with the kitchen and the existing bathroom upstairs and other things like that, I can’t imagine doing that without a master plan, but I might be a little biased from my big sister’s advice. So we’ve been trying to think about, you know, what can we do ourselves?
KJ
What do we need other people to help us out with? I’ve been getting better at figuring out who to call and ask these kinds of questions, and it’s definitely hit or miss. I’ve had some phone calls where it’s super helpful. And I feel like everything I ask, I get an answer that helps me figure out, in more detail, what are the actual next steps and what do I need to pull together with a subcontractor, the subcontractor. Other times I tried calling the permit office, and maybe I didn’t call the right person. I still need to figure it out, but we just confused each other terribly, and that’s definitely on me, because it’s my first time doing this, but I think, you know, we’ve been thinking about our three options of speed, quality or saving money. And definitely, I think the thing you know, we’ve done some projects already, but for the most part, we’re trading off on speed. We’re, you know, we plan to be in this house for a while. We want to do this right, and not spend too terribly much money on it. So we’re taking it slow and trying to do it at the cost we want, with the quality we want, with the plan we want, but we need a master plan.
Della Hansmann
Yeah, I think you do, but at this point you got to get in line, because we’re fully booked out through the end of September. This is actually not even a bit I really am trying to twist your arm here. Thanks for listening in podcast. So, yeah, this is I’m so delighted with how you guys are living in this house, making it your own. It’s funny, I never really thought of you guys as housey people.
Della Hansmann
You were so well suited to your apartment life too. But watching Kevin just nest into your garden and watching the two of you make this house your home, it’s been so satisfying. And for those of you listening, I’ve been intermittently posting photos of this process on Instagram. I’ll gather them into the show notes. So if you want to check out some of the really cool, bold paint choices that KJ makes, that I would never dare on my house because I do everything in gray, I’ll put those pictures together, and also some of the floor plans that we’ve been working out for this space.
KJ
Yeah, we’ve been trying to lean into really making it a place for us, and that, how would other people will use this room, or what makes the most sense from that perspective. And it’s been super comfortable from the get go. We’re, we’re loving being in here. We’ve got a lot more projects in mind, but the way it is now is also great. So it’s, it’s all good.
Della Hansmann
Yeah, it’s just been a delight to watch you guys go through this process, and it’s been fun to help out in the ways I can. I can’t wait for you guys to decide you actually need a master plan so we can organize the whole project. But I’ll stay tuned, and I’ll let you jump in right at the end of the line whenever you decide to sign up for that
KJ
sounds good.
Della Hansmann
If it wasn’t totally clear from the chat, basically, we’re talking about downgrading something that had been a den into a three season porch and a bike focused workshop to a house flipper. This would be madness, but my sister and her husband are planning to stay, and even if they weren’t, this is a change that will take their house from good to great. It fills the last of their major lifestyle needs that the house wasn’t meeting in a way that a third sitting room certainly would not.
Della Hansmann
Now I expect that your home is somewhat different from theirs, although mid century homes have a lot in common, but I know you have totally different personal preferences, passions and projects in mind. I challenge you though, to re examine your house. Does it have what you need right now? Maybe you have a formal dining room, but what you want is a sewing space. Your kids might each have their own bedrooms, all the spaces allocated, but they long for a playroom.
Della Hansmann
Could they double up to sleep and get a daytime chaos room and trade? Is your basement just holding stuff? Or could it be reallocated as much needed living space? Many home remodels include additions, but more can be accomplished than you expect by just reallocating the spaces from one unwanted task to another that you love, and you better believe it’s more budget friendly to make that choice you.