Blog - Page 33 of 34 - MidMod Midwest

Basement: the Midwestern Ranch House’s Secret Weapon

6 min readA basement is the secret weapon of the midwestern ranch house
(This is one clear advantage we have over all those cool, glassy California Pinterest ranches.

Upper midwestern basements secretly expand square footage, storage and differentiation of spaces all without bulking up the house to the street or eating up the building site.

Sure, basements CAN be your extraneous junk space. They CAN be your quick and dirty work out or project space. But they they COULD be the inner sanctum – the most private and cosy spot in the house, insulated from temperature, sound and other people’s view. The secret of an effective basement is not to treat it like part of your home, not a second class space.

Demo with a Dog

3 min readJust to throw a wrench in the works once again, I gave myself an additional major delay in construction (or de-construction) at the beginning of the year: bringing home a new dog, Roxie. Here’s a little intro to my pup and the techniques I’ve used to acclimate her to her new life as a construction dog.

I decided to make the most of my non-office-worker stint by bringing a pup into my life. After some research, I found Roxie at the Humane Society, sugar sweet but bouncing off the walls of the meeting room. She’s around a year and a half old and was picked up as a stray in Mississippi in December. I brought her home the last day of January. Continue reading “Demo with a Dog”

Progress: Basement Demolition and Discoveries

4 min readAfter a long winter of being distracted by design work and other projects, I got back to the fun of tearing apart the house again a few weeks ago.

[Actually I began some exploratory demolition by pulling down a few ceiling tiles at the end of January, only to be delayed by a the sudden memory that the building inspector hadn’t NOT said that the ugly acoustic tile ceiling could contain asbestos. I decided to play it safe and took a sample over to the Wisconsin State Lab of Hygiene for testing to confirm that it was safe. Thirty eight bucks and three weeks later I got the all clear and was ready to head back down the basement stairs.] Continue reading “Progress: Basement Demolition and Discoveries”

Micro Update: DIY Frosted Glass House Numbers

2 min readSometimes when you can’t decide on either the high, or the low, version of available products, the only option is to DIY.

When I painted last fall, I stripped off the mailbox, lights and house numbers. I’ve got the new box and lights in place but was having a hard time deciding on the right kind of numbers. The commercial options were either blah, or a little pricy for my budget.

Here’s how I split the difference and created my own solution. It highlights the original mid-century front door, enhances privacy, simplifies the entry and glow cheerily at night. Continue reading “Micro Update: DIY Frosted Glass House Numbers”

Micro Update: High/Low Mailbox and Entry Lights

2 min readFans of modernism all know that sometimes you have to pay through the nose for minimalism and great design … and sometimes you get away with the cheapest option in the shop. In this case, it was both.

I removed the original lights, house numbers and mailbox when during the painting process and could never bring myself to put them back on the house. I went through several weeks where the poor postman had to deliver to a the old box propped on the stoop. Continue reading “Micro Update: High/Low Mailbox and Entry Lights”

Favorite front doors to emulate

2 min readThe front entry is like your home’s face. It can have a friendly aspect or be forbidding. You want to make a good impression with it and yet its easy to miss the mark. Don’t loose a chance to make your entry shine.

Here are a few of my favorite front door samples from the area going from simple to strong. A few are even architect designed, but some just have the same paint on their door, mailbox and house numbers. You don’t need a big budget for a fun front door. Continue reading “Favorite front doors to emulate”

Featured Ranch: the Jacobs House

3 min readMost experts acknowledge some Wright influence on the development of the ranch. I see some very direct lines from his Usonian experiments and later midcentury mass housing styles.

This, and the other Usonian houses designed by Frank Lloyd Wright are more like older cousins of the ranch – not in the direct line but still strongly connected from both a design and lifestyle philosophy point of view.

Wright started to design Usonian or USA-onian houses during the depression when he was short of clients and those he did have were equally short of funds. They were more than cheap knockoffs, however. Wright designed the Usonian Houses to be a “building system, adaptable to each client with whatever modifications he might need regarding space and site conditions. Continue reading “Featured Ranch: the Jacobs House”

Going Grey, or it’s not easy to Paint outside in the swing seasons

2 min readI wanted to squeak in one quarter of the house painting – the street side – before the weather got too cold for proper curing conditions. Here’s how I gamed the weather to get the job done!

Modern paint technology is pretty miraculously forgiving of weather conditions but there are still limits to the times of day and year that you can effectively get paint to stick to outside surfaces.

Since we wanted to get at least the front of the house painted in the fall, we found ourselves playing with two very important metrics for the paint – temperature and humidity. Continue reading “Going Grey, or it’s not easy to Paint outside in the swing seasons”

Tearing out the Hedge-of-Doom

2 min readThe house itself isn’t the only dated thing about my little mid-century charmer – it also has an extremely old-fashioned yard. This is one more element that I plan to bring forward into the 21st Century.

I’ve been told that the previous owner was once an avid gardener with vegetables growing in a sunny patch in the back yard but in recent years it seems his yard work had devolved into harshly flat topping the hedge along the front of the house and surrounding the little decorative fence. Since the house went on the market, even that had stopped and little shoots were aimed upwards, threatening to engulf the house like the thicket of thorns around Briar Rose’s castle.

Frankly, even if I’d loved the hedge (which measured 4 feet high, 8 feet deep and 30 feet along the front of the house), it would have been hard to preserve it. It had been planted too close to the building and grown even closer – trying to get behind it to paint the siding would have been impossible. As it was, my yard-work loving mom joked about showing up to the closing with long-handled clippers and a saw. Continue reading “Tearing out the Hedge-of-Doom”

The Ranch House in Madison, Wisconsin

2 min readThe post war housing boom changed the character of American residential life in ways that still influence our daily lives now. In Madison, you can see the different “types” of post war houses, spread across neighborhoods on the east (mostly cape cod) and west (mostly ranch) sides of town.

The first post war housing boom spread out toward the manufacturing districts on Madison’s east side, filling in housing between Milwaukee and Atwood Avenues and on the west, filling in beyond Midvale Boulevard as several farms were converted into housing developments.

The “Ranch” house form lagged slightly behind the classic Levittown style “Cape Cod” in Madison’s development. The first houses to be added in these areas – in the first boom area from 1945 on – were the steep roofed Cape Cod styles sitting compactly centered on their lots. Continue reading “The Ranch House in Madison, Wisconsin”