Category: Design

What’s your mid-century storage style?

17 min readBefore you try to start solving any storage problem, I’m going to recommend that you set your storage style. Because of course I am!

Planning new storage solutions might be part of your remodel. But planning some storage improvements does not have to mean taking on a whole remodel. Storage is a great place to make smaller targeted updates as part of your mid-century remodel master plan. DIY-ing a small storage niche or a buying a new piece of storage furniture can easily be a weekend project. 

Your storage style is probably aligned with your mid-century style. Which you may already know if you’ve taken my style quiz. (If you haven’t, click that link and take it now!)

Knowing your storage style will help you decide between open or closed storage, choose vintage or modern pieces or details, and figure out which wood grain and tone will work in your home.

Listen Now On 

Apple | Spotify

Being prepared to make these choices upfront allows you to rinse and repeat your way to a house filled with coordinated custom built-ins or helps you hunt down a nicely matching set of vintage furniture to solve your problems instead.

Whether you lean vintage or modern, storage gives you an opportunity to create a cohesive feel through your home. Adding built-ins in a few key places around your house, can yield both better functionality and a “tied-together” feeling of design intention throughout your home.

In an original mid-century home that is at least a notch or two above builder grade, wood elements are often primary features. Hardwood floors, slat walls, paneling and built-ins are often included beyond the kitchen and bathroom. You may have a cute built-in room divider/shelf or built-in dining room storage. Most mid-century modest home have the wood floors and trim, maybe even some paneling, but are often missing those additional features.  

If you lean toward the vintage side, trying to preserve or recreate mid-century original storage solutions is eminently possible. And recreations don’t need to be fancy or expensive. Original mid-century built-ins were often very simple – stained single pieces of wood on metal brackets or simple box frames with partial overlay doors.

Because these pieces were often site-built by local builders or DIY-ed by homeowners using guides from publications like Better Homes & Gardens or Mario Dal Fabbro’s classic book, How to Make Built-In Furniture, they carry an approachable, hands-on charm. And even a novice level DIY-er can build them using those same guides.  

Not a builder? You can hunt down authentic mid-century furniture on social sites, thrift stores or architectural salvage warehouses. 

But what if your style leans a little more modern or mid mod fusion? Storage is a great place to add updated elements to a mid-century house. Whether you are planning to work with a high-end custom cabinet shop or choose a flat-pack system (like IKEA with custom doors from Semihandmade or Plykea), you’ll have a different set of choices. You’ll need to decide on frame style, door style and materials. And I actually covered those choices in Episode 2111. Whether you are choosing kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, mudroom, or basement storage the options are the same…and so are the answers. 

Resources 

And you can always…

Read the Full Episode Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Planning new storage solutions for your house doesn’t have to mean a whole remodel. You don’t need to do them all at once either. A little storage niche can be an eminently weekend DIY type project. But before you solve a storage problem, you need to set your storage style. Open or closed, vintage or modern, wood grain or painted. 

Make these choices up front, and then you can rinse and repeat your way to a beautiful house filled with coordinated custom built-ins, or just hunt down a nicely matching, but not actually originally matching, set of vintage furniture to solve your problems instead. 

Today we’re going to talk about the pros and cons of a more vintage preservation style of built-ins or a more modern update style of built-ins that either way should play nicely with any material finishes that already exist in your house. 

Hey there, welcome back to Mid Mod Remodel. This is the show about updating MCM homes, helping you match a mid-century home to your modern life. I’m your host, Della Hansman, architect and mid-century ranch enthusiast. You’re listening to episode 2603. 

Before we get into today’s topic, I want to remind you that now is absolutely the right time to get in touch if you are hoping to take on remodel work in 2027. If you want to get it done, or frankly, even really a medium-sized project started next year, we want to start your design process, ASAP. 

And Mid Mod Midwest is already booking out into design starts in 2027. But our process will begin with a conversation. You and I talking about what’s important to you, what’s going on with your house, what worries or roadblocks you’re experiencing, and what matters most to you in your upcoming plans. 

That kind of conversation, we should get it on the books in December. So pop on over to midmod-midwest.com slash work with us to get yourself a time on our calendar so you and I can have that first talk. Okay, uh, what else do I need to remind you of before we dive in on our topic? You’ll probably find it handy to go look at visual examples of the things I’m talking about today, and you can find some of them on our show notes page. 

But also I’ve got a whole guide to mid-century storage solutions, which links out to past episodes, to decluttering advice, to um resources, and to our Pinterest board that I’m continuing to kind of fill in with more specific storage solutions for each of the episodes as I record them. Grab that from the show notes page at midmodest.com/2603. 

Okay. So no matter what, whether you are leaning vintage or leaning modern for the style of your entire house, which should be related to the style of your storage, you want one thing more than anything else, which is consistency. And if you’re going to spring for storage built-in solutions in a few key places around your house, you get not just better places to put away your things and easier access to the objects of your daily life, but a cohesive, tied together feeling of design intention throughout the house. 

In an original mid-century house that was, you know, built above the builder grade, or frankly, even in a builder grade house, you’ll find a commonality, not just in the kitchen and bathroom. You’re gonna find wood grain specifically all over the place. Hardwood floors, wood post and beam structure in some cases, slat walls, wooden panels, and certainly uh wood built-ins in many more places than just kitchen and bathroom. 

You’ll find them in the living room, you’ll find them in the basement, you’ll find them in bedrooms, the trim on the house doors and the doors themselves will probably match or coordinate with the built-ins that you’ll find throughout. As we remodel, as we add layers and layers of detail to a house, that consistency can break down a little bit. 

And one of the big failings of if you sort of are scanning through Zillow and looking at a house, sometimes you’ll see a wipe slate clean flip where everything is painted white and everything has been replaced with sort of cheap Home Depot whatnot. But more often than that, even you’ll just see a bunch of different remodeling projects from a bunch of different eras that don’t really seem to be speaking to each other anymore. 

Now, no matter where you’re starting from, whether you’ve got a time capsule house that you now would like to modernize, but you don’t want your new kitchen, for example, to feel completely foreign to the rest of the house, it could be a really nice easing of that transition to keep some time capsule elements of the house. You don’t need to go through and change every piece of hardware or every swing door in the house. 

But if you put a few of your new built-ins in not just the kitchen, but also in a prominent bathroom, in the living room, at the entryway, you can start to create um a bilingual house, if you will, in terms of style languages that it’s speaking. You’ve got the vintage pieces and you want the new pieces to feel friendly to the old ones, but you can create consistency among all of the new pieces. 

Or conversely, if you’re dealing with a house that has been totally whited out, you’re adding back mid-century vintage or mid-century update adjacent details throughout the house. Again, you want that to appear in more than one spot. So even if what you’re primarily considering is a new kitchen, a new bathroom, you still want to have these things pop out in other places. 

This kind of throws back to the conversation I had with Nathan Hartman, the founder of Kerf Kitchens. If you are not familiar with Kerf Kitchens, there are beautiful end-grain, visible plywood specifically kitchens, but also built-ins for a bunch of different parts of houses. And that was, what would that have been? Episode uh 2308 back in February. If you missed it, it’s a great listen. 

Um, but if you heard it and you are just remembering, one of the things he talked about is that when they do a kitchen for a house, they often bring in just a couple of other places. You know, if you can see the living room from a relatively open planned kitchen, they might also do the entertainment center. Uh, they might do something at the entry of the house. So you don’t sort of come into the house experiencing one design language and then boom, you walk into the kitchen and something else completely different is happening. 

You feel the anticipation, you’re already seeing the pieces of the new kerf design layered into the house in multiple places. All right. So the topic for today’s episode is the vintage versus the modern and how these pieces kind of go together. Uh, and I’ve talked about this before, but I think in the specifically context of focusing on a season of storage solutions, a season of built-ins, if you will, that distinction is going to be really important. 

If you lean towards the vintage, if you’re trying to preserve and expand upon your mid-century original storage solutions, the most important thing, or if you’re trying to rebuild them from scratch, if you’re trying to recreate them in a sort of a preservationist manner, the most important thing to remember is that it does not need to be fancy or expensive. Often these are very simple. It’s a stained single piece of wood shelf on a metal bracket mounted on one of those vertical tack strips put onto the wall. Or it is a very simple box frame with partial overlay door. 

The trade-off, though, in a relatively simple vintage style, is that it is more highly crafted, might require more of your effort because it’s not the sort of thing that you’re going to be able to get from every cabinet shop. It’s certainly not the thing sort of thing you’re going to be able to get from your big box store. But that at the same time means it, even though it’s a thing that you kind of need to DIY, it is a thing you can DIY. 

And frankly, to do it yourself, to build it yourself, was part of the philosophy of these original homes. They usually came with a kitchen and with a bathroom built in, but often with an unfinished basement, or the idea that you would add on a rec room in addition off the back of the house. And that might be done by a builder locally, or it might be finished out by the owner of the home. But if you look at the publications from the day, the uh the Better Homes and Gardens, or the Popular Mechanics, there are all of these how-to manual advice pieces talking you through the process of creating your own built-ins. 

And there is absolutely nothing stopping us from taking that on for ourselves today. When I’m trying to identify the era of a built-in, there are a couple of signs that talk to me about it being an early mid-century, a mid-mid-century, or an 80s remodel, 90s remodel kind of a kitchen. I was just on site doing a field measure and site visit for a new master plan client earlier this week, and we were trying to determine without any permit data the build date of various built-ins throughout the house. 

The kitchen, we decided was almost certainly an 80s remodel. I kitchens are a little bit harder to date given style language, so it could have, could have even tipped into the 90s or it could have been 70s, but when we went into the bathroom, I was pretty sure the kitchen and bathroom were done at the same time. The bathroom was 80s as all. Get out, right down to the sort of beige uh tile, grouted tile countertop. Yikes. 

Um, but one thing, even though the cabinet doors were a partial overlay with an exposed hinge, which could even be a 60s style, the drawers had uh metal track roller pullouts. And that kind of hardware was not as common in the mid-century era. We went into the basement, and the basement entertainment center struck me as much more likely to be either original to the house or part of a first pass finished the basement project undertaken by the original owners before the end of the 1960s. 

And I could see when I opened up again, the drawers are kind of your telltale. A modern cabinet drawer is probably wrapped MDF or a sort of a or either wrapped in white o

r wrapped in a light sort of pine-ish finish. Um, but it’s multi-density, medium density fiberboard underneath. Um for a more 80s vintage, you’re probably gonna see uh a plywood or a solid wood door uh drawer sort of side panel, but it will be on a metal slider. 

Um for the 60s one, it was a relatively simple box frame drawer, but there was there was squeaking. I could hear metal on metal squeaking. So there was some kind of, it wasn’t a roller device, but it was like there was some kind of metal underneath it. And then for a 1950s door, uh drawer in a 1952 house, it’s just a wooden box jammed in a wooden hole. But like that’s that’s the drawer hardware. This is one of the reasons it becomes a little hard to pull them in and out. They don’t soft close, Lord knows. Um, and it’s one of the reasons people end up replacing mid-century built-ins because the drawers are kind of sticky. 

But anyway, um one of my favorite references for the kind of partial DIY nature, even though it may have been built by the homeowner or it may have been built by go by site built by a local builder, it was probably not built in a cabinet shop. If you’re looking with a 1950s built-in install for storage in your kitchen, in your bathroom, in your entertainment unit, anywhere, um, is this lovely book, How to Make Built-in Furniture by Mario Dal Fabbro. My personal copy, ironically, although the book was originally pug published in 1952, 1955, I beg your pardon. Um, my copy was published in Great Britain in 1962, a repr a reprint. Um, and was in the Kincardineshire County Library. Angus and Kincardineshire. I’m probably not pronouncing that right. 

Um, anyway, and then it made its way to me through modern book reselling properties. But you can find resale copies of this book. You can also find a scanned version of it online, I believe, in the USmodernist.org archive. I’ll look that up and see if I can find you a link to it. But in the foreword, Mario Dal Fabbro himself writes, Built-in furniture is becoming more and more the mark of a modern interior. The old method of dividing the living area by wall partitions is gradually giving way to the practice of leaving the area open and permitting the occupant to adapt the space to his own needs in accordance with his own taste. 

Thanks to built-ins, a room can have its own individual design, free of the monotonous uniformity of mass production furniture. Um it’s funny that they think that buying furniture is not putting personality into your house, but building built-ins is. Anyway, aside from these aesthetic considerations, built-ins can achieve real space economies by either utilizing wall recesses, attics, or the space beneath a sloping ceiling, or by making full use of a wall area from the floor to the ceiling and side to side. 

And then this book goes on to contain pretty helpful introduction to measuring, to purchasing wood, to finishing, to hardware, to anchoring and installing pieces, and then designs for bookshelves, for a bunch of different configurations, for desks, for radio cabinets, for wall-hung storage units, for radiator enclosures, for serving hatch from the kitchen to the living room, for a telephone shelf, built-in benches you can sit on, breakfast bars, um, a bunch of different ways to cleverly add storage to your attic, to your basement, to your garage, and eventually like an entire kitchen, um, island breakfast bar, storage wall, and bath cabinets. 

So you could you could do the built-in furniture for an entire house from the pages of this book, and it’s it’s beautiful, clear, lovely illustrations. I’ll put a couple of photos of it on the the show notes page. The thing that you will see over and over and over again in these vintage styles is um simple pieces of wood. It’s plywood and it is um lumberyard boards, it is exposing edges, there’s very little sort of decorative trim, um, it’s very simple construction, there’s not a lot of complicated hardware necessary, it’s just screws and cleats and hinges, uh, and it’s it’s very basic. 

Now, if you’re starting from scratch, if you’re building new built-in storage for your mid-century house, kind of whether you’re going vintage or mid-century in style, there’s a lot more commonality between a low, a low-cost DIY version and a high super custom solution than there is of the middle ground. Um, because mid-century original cabinets were often site-built by the contractor who built the rest of the house, not built, as I said, in a shop with boxes installed in the house as separate units, the way cabinets are now. 

And what that means is that while a high-end or just a philosophically creative custom cabinet shop can match you detail for detail on some of the things you’ll find in your mid-century original house or in someone else’s, if you’re going for a more price-conscious middle-of-the-line supplier that starts from pre-made box units, like you would find at a big box store, or flat pack like you’d find at IKEA. That system is going to depend more on predetermined regular units and have less room for creative flexibility for clever storage niches into that last available inch of space, as Mario Dal Fabbro was talking about, of like getting into the cavities of the house. 

They’re going to be a little bit more stack along the edges of the space. Now, this is not the end of the world. There is plenty of good design to be found in flat pack IKEA kitchens. Um, IKEA themselves has a nice line of walnut doors, or you can go with a semi-custom door and drawer replacement, like the kind supplied by uh semi-handmade or plaikia. It does mean that if you’re not willing or able with your own skill and available time to follow the advice in a mid-century built-in design guide, or to get a truly custom mid-century uh anchored built-in setup done by a high-end custom cabinet shop, you are going to be doing something a little bit more regular looking, a little bit more a little bit more related to the style of the person that’s selling it to you, and a little bit less related to the style of your house. 

One way or another, you will recognize that you’re being shown something, or you get to choose between options that are going to go towards the cabinet box type, which basically means does it or doesn’t it not have a face frame? You can have a European style or a traditional style. The European is just the edges of something. A traditional is the four outside edges of something, and then a front piece with a hole in it that then has a door or a drawer over it. And this will definitely affect how sort of tied in, how built-in the built-ins feel. Or I suppose you can have no framing whatsoever. You can just have shelves mounted on a wall, and that is also, if done right, a classic mid-century style. Um, either can be correct for mid-century style, the European or the traditional. Similarly, you’ve got options for door type. 

If you’re going full vintage, you’re gonna choose a partial overlay door with like a browdered curved edge, not a curve in the, it won’t, this will still be a rectangle, but the edge profile of the door will be lightly curved. Uh for a much more modern, much more contemporary look, you’ll go with a full overlay door. That’s just a simple, each door and drawer front is a full square-edged uh prism. And then you’re gonna be thinking about what is it made of? Are you looking at wood grain? What is the veneer type? Again, for all of this, I’m gonna point you towards an episode I’ve done in the past on mid-century kitchen cabinets, but this applies to all of your built-ins everywhere. And that is episode uh, let’s see, 2111 from June of 2025. 

Now, what are your storage options if you are not solving your storage problems with built-ins? I said in the very first episode of this season that you don’t have to have built-ins to solve storage problems, and you don’t. Um, this is where I have so much more affection for the simple builder grade storage solutions or the cheap furniture solutions of the mid-century era than I do for the less expensive and easier to access storage solutions of today. 

Back in the mid-century, it was pretty easy to go to the lumber yard and get some of those triangular shelf brackets with little vertical mounting strips and some astonishingly dense grained, high-quality random board lumber and fill one of those blank empty closets with very effective storage or line your basement with very effective storage. There is still nothing stopping us from doing that today. The boards are a little more fast growth, a little less densely grained, but those triangular mounting clips and brackets are still around. 

But today, much more often when we need storage, I think it’s the default to assume we’ll just run down to Target and grab one of those flat pack knock-together little cheap storage six square, eight square opening MDF stacking storage unit things. Um, maybe a collection of brightly colored fabric boxes to put your objects into. And there’s nothing wrong with that conceptually, but what it actually means is you’re bringing a whole bunch of wood glue and formaldehyde or similarly disgusting off-gassing chemicals into your home. 

And those little flat pack units made out of MDF are heavy as hell, hard to repurpose, and rapidly go from looking relatively fresh and tidy to pretty beat up, dirt, dirty, and cheap. They’re not repairable, they’re not reusable, and for anyone who’s ever depended on them in an apartment life through several moves, know that they do not survive more than two moves before they get wobbly and never stop wobbling. In my opinion, therefore, a far more successful approach to furniture solutions for your mid-century storage would be to go hunting on Facebook Marketplace for an authentic piece of mid-century furniture, which, yeah, might have a little plywood in it, but no MDF. That’s medium density fiberboard if you’re not familiar. And it will survive many moves and be pretty with its veneer covering while it stores your stuff in drawers. 

Um speaking of, though, those uh triangle bracket and shelf versions, uh, one piece of advice I have if you are paying attention to your neighborhood, if you ever see a neighbor cleaning out their old basement storage shelves or something else and dumping a bunch of old wood on the curb for trash, pick it up, take it home. That is good, solid, strong wood. You will not find in the same quality at the same species at a lumber yard today. Best quality you can find without demolishing a Victorian house, basically.

I know I just did an episode on decluttering, and you know what? In it, I confess that I am a hoarder of potential project supplies, but I am strongly gonna recommend that if you ever see anybody trying to put into a landfill simple pine storage shelves from the 1950s or 60s, uh that stuff is practically bomb blast proof and you should salvage it. Okay. 

So whether you choose to try to match or at least coordinate as much as possible with uh any vintage original built-ins in your house, or whether you choose to distinctly make a difference, to do something clearly modern, like for example, apply Kia kitchen and apply Kia entry storage unit and apply Kia um bathroom, and then the rest of your house has its original mid-century doors and a few built-in walls, shelves, and things. That can be a lovely contrast. 

There is not a right or a wrong way to do this. There are pros and cons to both approaches, and I think it’s just gonna end up depending mostly on your style guide. If you have not yet done the work to set up your style guide for your whole house remodel, then I recommend A that you take a mid-century master plan whole house approach to this process, or at least B, you run yourself through the style guide system. 

I’ve got a very affordably priced class that walks you through that process within sort of a two-hour time window that you can find on my courses page. I’ll link to that in the show notes. It’s the more than a mood board course because you need more than just a mood board to really plan an excellent remodel. And I know that you can. Um, but yeah, setting up the style guide, knowing what kind of wood grain or paint, painted wood can be possible, but I would recommend wood grain for your new storage solution built-ins, or that you’re going to be hunting down. 

If you’re sourcing vintage furniture on Facebook Marketplace, you’re looking for a lighter warm stain rather than a darker one. And when that pops up, you will drop in the car and drive for at least an hour to go pick those up. You’re looking for um pieces that have a certain type of hardware, a certain kind of metal. These consistent details. 

Or if you’re working with a local cabinet shop to create built-in solutions, they’re all going to be face frame, or they’re all going to be uh European frame. You’re going to have some clear commonalities that come up again and again and again. And then you just rinse-repeat your details as you create more and more better storage areas throughout your house. 

One way or another, every other area that I’m about to talk about in the following episodes should end up. It won’t look the same because what you need for access for visibility, for places to sit down versus places to put things away, in an entry hall versus a bedroom closet are not the same, despite the fact that in a builder grade house, the hall closet and the bedroom closet will look exactly the same. 

If you’re gonna go to the trouble to doing a custom built-in, they should be different, but they should be made out of the same materials in the same way. That’s not surprisingly the most important element of all of this. So I’m gonna point you towards the reference Pinterest board, towards the links I’m gonna drop in the show notes page today. 

You can find all of that at midmodest.com slash 2603. And I’ll be back next week with specific storage solution advice for…we’ll probably start with the front door for your entry area. So catch you next week, mid mod remodeler. See you then.

Decluttering doesn’t have to be a nightmare.

19 min readThis decluttering episode is not about perfectionism. It is about best fit storage solutions. About planning realistic storage with a little bit of squish. Real-world answers that fit you and your approach to the stuff in your life.

That said, a solid declutter is a great “step zero” for a remodel plan—especially one focused on storage solutions.

I’ve talked about clutter and decluttering before on the podcast. If you feel inspired after listening, check out these past episodes… 

  • Episode 206 – Exploring various ways of thinking about decluttering.
  • Episode 308 – Looking at how your existing house layout affects clutter accumulation and storage problems.
  • Episode 1608-Step-by-step advice for completing a project from Kendra Adachi, The Lazy Genius.

I love Kendra Adachi’s work and have recommended her a number of times. Her messages of matching your activities to your energy level, to letting go of things that don’t serve you and of being kind to yourself resonate with me. I recently found Tracy McCubbin’s book, Making Space, Clutter Free: The Last Book on Decluttering You’ll Ever Need and her work resonated in a similar way. 

Clutter is not random. The storage stuff in our homes carries meaning and emotion behind it, and trying to get rid of things can be a challenge if you aren’t acknowledging why they are important to you. When looking at the psychological barriers to letting go Tracy names the “clutter blocks” we all experience…

  • Your stuff is keeping you in the past. Objects become physical manifestations of memories, making it hard to let go of children’s artwork, outdated clothing from past versions of your life, or tools for hobbies you no longer pursue.
  • Shopping to feel happy. Purchasing items as an activity brings temporary joy, but things pile up unused.
  • Stuff as a visual to-do list. Unfinished projects, paperwork, and unreturned items become to-do lists in pile form.
  • Fantasy items for a fantasy life. Keeping gear, clothing, or equipment for a life you aren’t actually leading.
  • Feeling like you aren’t“worth” your good stuff. Storing designer clothes, unlit candles, or good china away out of fear of damaging them, rather than using and enjoying them today.
  • Being trapped with other people’s stuff. Holding onto family heirlooms or estate items out of an “Antiques Roadshow mentality” over their unknown monetary or sentimental value.
  • The sunk cost fallacy. Punishing yourself by keeping clothes that don’t fit or tools you don’t enjoy simply because you paid good money for them.

Now, we might not experience every one of these blocks. But most of us experience more than one. And we don’t need to resolve them all before we being to improve our storage options. Everyone’s goal isn’t a minimalist, magazine tidy home. Most of us just want orderly spaces that work for us and our families, so we aren’t tripping over shoes every time we walk through the door.   

Parkinson’s Law tells us that work expands to fit the available time for its completion—and the same is true of clutter; we tend to fill up our living areas with all the stuff they will hold. Because we do tend to fill out spaces, you’ll probably have to purge at least a bit before you organize. You can’t successfully organize pure clutter. So, I think Tracy’s method might be helpful as an initial step. 

While you don’t need to get rid of everything you own, we don’t want to do is design a house or big enough to hold everything you would keep if you never asked yourself if the things you’re keeping really mattered. It’s not a good use of your time, money, and energy to just create space for things instead of space for living. And to be perfectly frank, if budget is an object, if you are worried about whether you can afford all the things you want to have in your remodel, one of the most expensive things you can do in a remodel is add new square footage. Expanding the footprint of your house in any way to push out an addition, to grow the volume of the house, is more expensive than anything you would do to change things up inside the house. Not necessarily one-to-one. 

But clutter isn’t just about you or your stuff…the design of your house influences how clutter accumulates and how objects pile up. If there isn’t a right, accessible place in the house to put things away, your stuff will always just explode out of an ill-suited spot back into clutter. Even if you’ve done a really thorough purge.

I’m going to encourage you to think of decluttering not as a virtuous activity, but as one step in the process of designing a remodel that fits your life and budget. Maybe add this to your Discover step. And as you’re looking at all of the things that are accumulated in your house that need better storage solutions, remember to ask yourself why those things are adding up? What meaning do they have? What emotion is lurking behind and underneath them? And does knowing that help you put them in a better place or get rid of them entirely? 

Listen Now On 

Apple | Spotify

Resources 

And you can always…

Read the Full Episode Transcript

Before I say a single word about decluttering before a remodel, I want to make one thing clear. This is not an episode about perfectionism. This is not an episode about determination and purging every unnecessary object from your life. This is about best fit solutions. This is about planning realistic storage with a little bit of squish. Real-world answers that fit you and your whole family and your approach to the stuff in your life. 

That said, a solid declutter is a great step zero for a remodel plan, especially one focused on storage solutions. So today we’re going to talk about the objects in our lives and why we’re hanging on to them. Yeah, you and me both. And if knowing why we are hanging on to them makes it a little easier to let some go. 

Hey there. Welcome back to Mid-Mod Rebodel. This is the show about updating MCM homes, helping you match a mid-century home to your modern life. I’m your host, Della Hansman, architect and mid-century ranch enthusiast. You’re listening to episode 2602. Now, um, as I said last week, this whole season is going to be connected to the idea of great mid-century storage solutions for your home. 

And I wrote a free PDF guide that goes with the season at large and will walk you through the process of taking a master plan approach to storage in your life. What is important for you, for your family and your personal preferences, what’s going on with the house that you have, what your taste has to say about this, and then how to seek out solutions and boil them into your actual plan of action. It’s also linked to a handy Pinterest board that I’ve been creating in real time to go along with this season and I’ll continue to add to. And I think it’s just a great place to get started. 

So grab that from the show notes page at midmodest.com slash 2602, or you can go directly to grab it from midmodest.com slash storage. Okay. Um here’s the thing. When you are planning solutions to storage, you’ve got to seek out clutter. And we want to solve our storage problems at the source. 

So anywhere you have a tendency to accumulate clutter in your house may indicate a lack of sufficient storage or a lack of the correct storage. And it’s important to know which problem of those two, lack of sufficient or lack of correct, you are trying to solve before you solve it. Taking a quick thought experiment stroll or a physical stroll around your house can highlight where your storage needs are most prominent by identifying where there are piles of things, or an object out of place, or where a drawer is ajar because you needed to fold everything up perfectly before it all fit in there. 

Now, you can organize and tidy these extra objects, but if there’s not just a place in the house to put something away, but an easy and accessible, a right place in the house to put everything away, the storage will also always just explode back into clutter. So as I said at the top of the episode, I am going to advise you to look for a sweet spot in paring down your collections to size your proper storage. Um, I’ve already done an entire episode. 

I’m gonna do a little rundown on the episodes I’ve done in the past about decluttering. And they are all helpful. And getting rid of some things is a good idea. But I’m not pushing you towards some sort of Spartan minimalism here. I’m not telling you that you should hark back to the traumatic 90s diet culture of my youth or whatever crazy diet culture we’re in today and think about like using your willpower and a light summer flu to suddenly drop two pant sizes and get rid of all your other pants, and then you’ll be a perfect person for the rest of your life. That is not a long-lasting solution to pants, and it’s not a long-lasting solution to stuff. 

So instead, we want to fit storage solutions with a little bit of squish for your everyday life. And we want to think about storage throughout the rest of the season in such a way that you don’t have to take step 12 extra steps and cross a room to put something where it goes. Um, you shouldn’t have to neatly organize every drawer before all the things that belong in it fit into it. And the storage solutions that are important for you also need to work for every member of your household and be easy to follow by all the members of your household. 

So, um with all that said, let’s talk about how to properly think about extra stuff or just all the stuff that you have. I’ve talked about this since the very beginning. In the second season, episode 206. I talked about various ways of thinking about decluttering. And going back to that episode, I was reminded that there is this uh law of efficiency in work planning. Parkinson’s law says that work will expand to a fit the available time for its completion. And this is absolutely true of clutter and stuff and collections in our spaces. 

We tend to fill up our homes, our living areas, with all the stuff that they will hold. So when we’re thinking about organizing, when we’re thinking about planning for storage, we’ve got to purge before we organize. You can’t organize pure clutter. And if we’re going to uh probably the most famous name in getting rid of extra stuff from the last several decades will point to Marie Kondo, um touching every object in your life, judging whether or not it brings you, well, it sparks you joy, if I remember correctly. Um a Marie Kondo purge of your things can be lovely. I did it myself in the, oh, I think in the 2010s. And lo and behold, I have I have accumulated more objects since then. It’s not a permanent solution, but her objects, her methods can really help. 

I have also talked about how the design of your house being an influence on how clutter accumulates and how objects pile up. So if you’re curious about that, on what the existing layout of your house might be doing to affect the way that you’ve got storage problems, um episode 308 from the third season might be a really good jumping off point. 

And this kind of gets to that discovery process I was talking about last week, where you follow yourself around the house mentally, watching for where you’re setting things down. As I put it in that episode, this is particularly useful if you’ve been having a rough week so far or a bit of a rough go of it. You may, however, this this experiment may already be in progress. Where are there piles in your house? Take stock and now work on them. In that episode, I also talk a little bit about apartment therapy, which was a blog from the heyday of the blogging era with some great advice on it that resulted in a book written by its uh the blogger, Maxwell Ryan. He uh, among other things, had a lot of great small-paced storage solutions because he was a New Yorker and he was talking about primarily New York-based apartments and how to make them more beautiful, more warm, more colorful, but also better filled with storage. 

And he was most interested in solving the solution at the entry point to the apartment. He recommended something called a landing strip, which was a place to filter out clutter at the door, a place for shoes, for coats, for bags, for keys, a defined area where all of those things could be set down at the one entry point of the house. Now, your mid-century house may not have one entry point, and it may be harder than just having a hook for keys and a hook for one coat on the door, uh on the wall by the door, when you’ve got kids and multiple adults and a bunch of people all using the space together. But it’s still a useful place to jump off. 

And then about 10 seasons ago, uh episode 1608, I got into advice for decluttering from one of my favorite podcasters, uh, Kendra Adachi, whose podcast, The Lazy Genius, had a great episode on step-by-step advice for how to complete a project, any project, but specifically excellent advice for decluttering. So you might want to check out that framework for taking on a declutter project. 

But looking forward, I wanted to share in this season on storage a maybe more holistic approach to understanding the objects that we hang on to. I came across this book several years ago, and I’ve been wanting to talk about the podcast ever since, uh, called Making Space, Clutter Free, Making Space Clutter Free by Tracy McCubbin. This was published in 2019, and it deals with the underlying psychological issues of our stuff. Tracy is a house organizer professionally, and so she shares a bunch of examples of people she’s worked with and what was sort of holding them up from getting rid of their stuff. But I’m gonna give you some of the specifics in a moment, but I really think this idea of why we hang on to stuff is important. 

And just trying to get rid of things can be so challenging if you aren’t acknowledging why they’re important to you. Marie Condo also tried to get to this with her whole hold on to it, does it spark joy? If not, let it go, thank it for its service and send it out of your life. That’s great, but this is like, I don’t know, going to therapy for your things. If you don’t ask why, do you really know what you’re doing? Do you really care to do it all the way? In my job as a residential architect, I haven’t seen quite so much of the intimate insides of people’s storage as the author Tracy McCubbin has, but I really do validate some of the psychological sources of stuff that she highlights in her, as she describes them, clutter blocks. 

Um, I’m gonna go into more or less detail on some of these, which seem more or less relevant to me based on the things I see coming up again, again, and for my mid-century house clients, but I think each of these may ring a bell for you. The first clutter block is that your stuff is keeping you in the past. When the objects around you aren’t just things, but they are physical manifestations of your memories, it can feel really hard to let those things go without feeling like you’re losing the past too. 

And so this kind of hanging onto stuff covers a lot of children’s artwork or old outgrown things that you can’t get rid of. Old outdated clothing from past versions of your life, an old job or a different body type, or weather activities you don’t encounter anymore, um, dishes, or maybe even a whole room, formal dining setup for a type of hosting you don’t do anymore. Tools, craft supplies, etc., for a hobby you don’t have as much time for these days. 

Um, that last one, hey, fellow ADHD friends, are you holding on to the detritus from your past dozen hyperfixations in your house? How many of those are you coming back around for? Because maybe only some of them really need to stick. After she’s identified what a psychological block is and what kind of stuff this generally manifests as, she has what she describes as a bridge, which is how you sort of get beyond it, let it go. And the bridge for this one is to just recognize this for what it is and you take its power. Then you can keep one or two items that hold a good memory for you and let the rest of them go. This might fall into the category of like take a photograph of your stuff and then give it away. I don’t know. That always feels a little cheesy to me. 

But basically, if you find that you’re hanging on to things as an aid memoir, that’s not an efficient use of the your one wild and precious life or the storage in your house. Um, is that the second color block she calls up is that your stuff tells you who you are, that you’re shopping to feel happy. You’re you’re letting purchasing as an activity um give you joy, and then things pile up and they never even get used. This, to me, it’s funny. She wrote this book in 2019, and I was like, oh, this is what we did in the pandemic. We ordered stuff from the internet and waited for it to come, and it was like how time passed. 

That’s what I did in the pandemic. I tried to keep it to sort of I’m expecting one item of clothing or craft supply, or, oh, and it’s new fabric for the masks I’m sewing, and it’s coming in the mail, and I’m tracking it. It’s a new book. I’m following it across the country to me. Uh yeah, in those really weird days of the shutdown, I definitely did that. 

And I think we all can be guilty of a little bit of shopping to keep ourselves happy, but the bridge in this case is just look for other sources of dopamine. It’s also absolutely possible that sometimes you keep stuff because it’s the things you’re avoiding: uh paperwork, mail, unfinished projects, unreturned items, these kind of become a to-do list in pile form. Uh, and sadly, she has no magic bullet for this. She’s just like, look, you’ve got to go deal with your visible to-do lists. If you personally are a person who keeps your to-do list in pile form in plain sight, or perhaps even more obnoxiously, if you live with someone who needs to keep their to-do lists as piles, um, this sounds like my parents’ source of constant disagreement. 

My mom wants like a less cluttery house, and my dad needs to leave something on the steps so that he’ll remember to take it out with him next time, except then sometimes he doesn’t. Um raise your hand if this feels like someone you live with and love, or someone you are and you know it’s annoying your loved ones. This might be just the sort of thing that a storage solution needs to be created where yes, you can have a visible to-do list, you can have a pile of papers to be answered or objects to be moved to another space, but it can’t be in the main traffic areas. It can’t be blocking someone else’s access to their daily life. 

It’s gotta be we’ve gotta make a we’ve got to make a storage solution for that. Um, the fourth cutter block is fantasy stuff for your fantasy life, collections of clothing for trips you haven’t taken, crafts you don’t know how to do yet, equipment for cooking you don’t actually take on, exercise gear you don’t use. Basically, if you’ve got a bunch of the stuff in your life for a life you don’t lead, then the bridge to that is to focus on action instead of acquisition. Meaning maybe you start using the things you’ve been storing up, or maybe you let them go and focus on the hobbies you actually have right now. 

One interesting clutter block that can create a need for more room in your house than you really need is feeling like you’re not worth your good stuff, um, which might mean keeping, even displaying the good versions of things you never use. Designer clothes you store in a closet but don’t want to damage by wearing. A collection of unlit candles, unused bath salts, pleasant treats for the future that you just never get through. The good china on a shelf that never sees a dinner. 

The bridge for this is use it. Now you don’t need two sets of everything in your life. Now, sure, you don’t want to do yard work in your favorite new clothes, but you can let yourself use the good stuff today and appreciate it in the moment. I will say I’m about to get to the sixth one, which is also gonna feel related to this, but sometimes there is a sentimental reason to keep um some of the good stuff more on display than in use, but also I think whenever you’re keep finding yourself keeping multiple collections of something, you’ve got the daily use stuff and the stuff you almost never use. 

Ask yourself, do those really need to be two separate objects? Um the sixth uh clutter block is being trapped with other people’s stuff. This often looks like family heirlooms. Um, and it can be really hard for people to get rid of these because they’re like, what in my what if it was valuable? What if it was secretly really special? I’ve been told this was really precious once. Um Trace McGevin calls this the antiques roadshow mentality. 

People really worry that family items have an unknown monetary value, and they’re sure they have a sentimental value, so they can’t be gotten rid of. But again, like letting yourself use the good stuff, you should have stuff you like. Now, for us mid-century lovers, it might well be that the stuff you like is considered an antique. It might even have come from your grandparents or an estate sale, but only keep it if you like it. If you have multiple sets of china from previous generations, boxes of unsorted memorabilia, unlabeled photographs, and things from past family members, unused rooms filled with vintage furniture that’s in someone else’s style. 

This is a hard one. And particularly, I’m I’m in a sandwich generation. I’m not sandwiching myself, uh, which for which I’m grateful, but you know, I I have things in my home that belonged to my grandparents that my parents took on when they cleared out their house and didn’t have a place for. At some point, I will have many things in my life that belong or belonged to my parents, and I won’t want to get rid of that all right away. But keeping every possession of a past loved one doesn’t help you remember their life. It’s keeping you frozen in yours. 

So choose one or two things that really remind you of them, or one or two dozen things that really remind you of them, and let the rest go. And the seventh clutter block is the stuff you keep paying for in your mind. You paid good money for that and now you don’t want to let it go. This is the sunk cost fallacy of clutter. Yes, it sucks that you paid more for it than you got fun out of it, but don’t punish yourself by keeping it around. Let it go. 

This also catches a different psychological angle on the same things. Clothes you don’t fit anymore, exercise equipment you don’t use, tools and craft supplies you don’t enjoy. So, what do you do when you’ve touched all of these or any of these seven clutter blocks and realized, oh, this really this is me. This is why I have a basement full of stuff I don’t touch, never use, but it’s taking up all of my available out-of-the-way storage space. Well, it’s time for a perch. You sing the song from Frozen and you let it go. 

You can resell things if that feels like a fun project, but don’t let making that into a task stop you from getting rid of things. So if it’s easier to just give it away, if that’s faster and lets you live your life, do that. Here’s the biggest takeaway from this book, Making Space Clutter Free for me. Clutter is not random. Clutter, storage stuff has meaning. It has emotion behind it. You bought or were given that thing. You set a thing down on that surface and left it there. Why? Are you tapped on emotionally? Are you trying to remind yourself of something or out of space to put that away because the space to put it away is filled up with lurking emotional boulders? What’s up with that storage problem? 

So, sure, you can get out the big black trash bag energy and work yourself into an adrenaline spike and just get rid of a bunch of things. But will that really solve the problem at the source? No. So here’s what I want to leave you with. Let’s try to take the shame out of our stuff. My own example is that I am a natural minimalist in terms of clothing and a lot of food and lifestyle needs. I love routine. I do the same thing over and over again. I like to eat the same dinner every night. I certainly like to eat the same breakfast every morning. I wear the same clothes again and again and again through each season. The capsule wardrobe idea speaks to me. In fact, I effectively do it without really thinking about it. 

But my storage Achilles heel is never being able to let go of something that could potentially be used in a future house or craft project. And I come by this honestly, because there is stuff in my garage right now that I’ve never touched, and I don’t even know what it was for. Um, but it was just in case tools or supplies saved by my grandfather, cleared out of his house when he died more than 15 years ago, um, put into a storage unit for my parents, by my parents, um, which was then got cleared out and decommissioned when they moved and dumped on me. 

We had a yard sale out of my garage and a bunch of stuff that didn’t sell, is still in there. My dad has 44 acres of his own property to keep stuff on, and Lord help me, he’s got stuff in my garage, and when he’s not around anymore, all of things in his barn and garage and basement will become my responsibility as well. 

Long story short, I am not standing up on my high horse to tell you that I have all the answers to solving a clutter or a storage problem. Um, I’m not telling you this to give you a sense that you should or will get rid of your stuff, but I do want to open a possibility. Because what we don’t want to do is design a house or storage big enough to hold everything you would keep if you never asked yourself if the things you were keeping really mattered. That’s not a good use of your time, money, and energy to create space. 

And to be perfectly frank, if budget is an object, if you are worried about whether you can afford all the things you want to have in your remodel, one of the most expensive things you can do in a remodel is adding in new square footage, expanding the footprint of your house in any way to push out an addition, um to grow the volume of the house, basically. That’s more expensive than anything you would do to change things up inside the house. Not necessarily one-to-one. 

There’s probably some cheap, quick and dirty addition you could do that’s less expensive than a full, beautiful, perfect jewel box remodel of an interior space. But as a rule of thumb, it’s better to keep your house at the size that it is now and then do what we can with it. And if that means shifting activities, downgrading them so we don’t have to make your daily life worse, but we can move some storage out of daily life spaces into less important spaces. We can move, um, we can improve on some of your basement spaces, for example, if you’ve got it, if we can condense some storage space from all of the basement to some of the basement. One way or another, we can keep your whole remodel a little bit more surgical and precise if we’re not trying to fit it around every object you’ve ever accumulated in your whole life. 

But I also will end where I began by saying that I’m not recommending that you purge every unused daily object from your life. I’m not advocating for perfect minimalism. I don’t even think it’s necessary. We want to acknowledge and support your natural predilections. We want to study the way you and the way everyone else in your household accumulates things on a repeating cycle, and we want to create space that contains and supports all of that effectively. 

So, hopefully you may have found some category of things pop to your mind as I talked about these various clutter blocks and what causes people to feel hung up on hanging on to a particular type of thing that will let you let something go. Um, if you want to know more about it, the I only was quoting from sort of the first third of this book on making space clutter-free. And I think I would go ahead and recommend it. 

As you’re looking at all of the things that are accumulated in your house that need better storage solutions, remember to ask yourself why those things are adding up? What meaning do they have? What emotion is lurking behind and underneath them? And does knowing that help you put them in a better place or get rid of them entirely? 

I will link to all those previous decluttering episodes of the Mid Modern Model podcast that I mentioned on the show notes page, as well as putting all the information about this book if you’d like to go get it, describes itself as the last book on decluttering you’ll ever need. And I say bet, but I still think it’s a good one. And um, and yeah, I also think you might have a good time reading through my free resource on storage solutions for mid-century houses. All of that is going to be at the show notes page, midmod-midwest.com/2602. 

And I will be back next week to talk to you about vintage versus modern storage styles, um, both aesthetically and sort of procedurally, and how you can make the most of storage solutions in your home, whether it is a perfect time capsule that you’re trying to tune up, or whether it is already sort of flipped and you’re reinfusing it with a modernist uh mid century aesthetic. Uh, more on storage solutions here for the rest of the season. Catch you next week, mid mod remodeler.

Master Plan Your Mid-Century Storage.

19 min readYour mid-century home could probably use more storage. Today I am going to ask you to slow down and learn why my Master Plan Method might be the best way to solve your storage woes.

Storage is a near universal mid-century home problem, and it comes up for every design client and every ready-to-remodel homeowner in every space around all of their homes. 

The good news? There are solutions. The better news? There are solutions that can add both storage and charm into your mid-century home. 

First, there is an option that doesn’t involve adding anything. You can weed stuff out, have less and choose to live within your home’s meager mid-century closets. 

You can also go low-ish cost and low disruption by focusing on finding the perfect piece of mid-century storage furniture or the perfect suite of modular storage for every space. A little storage is better than nothing. And this might a great “for now” solution as you (or we) create your master plan. 

And you can combine these lower impact options with more robust solutions based on your goals and budget and the life you want to live in your home. Not every storage solution needs to be solved with beautiful, expensive built-ins. Sometimes the solution is vintage furniture to attractively conceal your items, or wireframe shelves with neatly organized plastic storage tubs in a basement.

And I’m not going to rule out any of these options. 

BUT I am going to argue that using my Master Plan Method to design the right storage for your home and your life is potentially transformative.

Solving the Right Problems by Asking the Right Questions

It is completely reasonable to go from “I feel a frustration” straight to looking for solutions. This is what drives people directly to Pinterest first thing or causes them to rush out and buy storage furniture to cram things into without matching available resources to their actual needs.

In reality, we end up with solutions that really work when we start by asking the right questions. Which is why I begin every design process with a lot of information gathering. I ask about how my clients live in their homes and how it could function better, including questions about: 

  • Daily Routines: When and how do you access your belongings? What do comings and goings look like in your house? 
  • Habits & Hobbies: Are you a Costco family, or do you pick up something on the way home for dinner? Do you have storage-demanding hobbies like woodworking, quilting, or puzzles?
  • Visibility vs. Concealment: Do you like to see your belongings arranged around you because it gives you a sense of pride or peace? Or does seeing a bunch of objects create noise and chaos in your brain, making it better to have everything tucked tidily away behind a cabinet door?

Applying the Master Plan Method to Storage

For anyone rusty on the process, my Master Plan Method uses 5-D thinking to plan the right remodel for your home and life. The 5 D’s are:

  1. Dream: An internal process making mental lists of your hobbies, cooking style, and lifestyle habits.
  2. Discover: Taking stock of your house to understand where the trouble spots are and where there might be missed storage opportunities. Then documenting it with photos of your rooms and specific details. 
  3. Distill: Determining your mid-century style. This sometimes means time-capsule vintage or your style might be a modern update that adds a cohesive material layer to your home.
  4. Draft: Turning clever ideas, images, and advice into a number of plans that bring your house into alignment with your life. I always recommend developing three options for any space.
  5. Develop: Whittling your drafts and style choices down into an action plan that fits your life, budget, and energy level.

Listen Now On 

Apple | Spotify

Resources 

And you can always…

Read the Full Episode Transcript

Your mid-century home could probably use more storage. Nearly everyone’s can. This is a near universal mid-century home problem, and it comes up for every design client and every ready-to-remodel homeowner in every space around all of their homes. The good news is that solutions to this problem are many and varied. 

You can weed out stuff and have less, sure, or you can focus on finding the perfect piece of mid-century storage furniture or the perfect suite of storage built-ins for every space. A little storage is better than nothing, and a full-fledged master plan for storage is potentially transformative. So today kicks off our brand new season on mid-century storage solutions and built-ins for every room. 

Today we’re going to begin with, of course, how to master plan the storage solutions for your house. 

Hey there. Welcome back to Midmodern Model. This is the show about updating MCM homes, helping you match a mid-century home to your modern life. I’m your host, Della Hansman, architect and mid-century ranch enthusiast. 

You’re listening to episode 2601. Here’s a quick overview of what’s coming up today and over the weeks to come. Basically, from now through the rest of the year, we are going to be talking about storage in your mid-century house. 

Today I’m focusing on the process, how to ask yourself the right questions so that the answers you come up with are going to solve your problems. Tomorrow, oh, next week, rather, I’m going to be talking to you about decluttering. 

And I do not mean to make this a should-based episode, a shame-based episode. In some ways, I’m going to give you a permission structure to keep things that are important to you, but I’m also going to be highlighting a book I came across recently on the psychology behind the things we keep in our house and how perhaps touching on the underlying why of the collections or the detritus or the stuff that it’s just hard to get rid of can help us get rid of it more easily or understand it in a new way. 

So, some thoughts on how to clear out extra stuff from your life, because as has said been been said on the podcast before, you can’t actually organize clutter when it’s literally just clutter. Um, purging first and then organizing is a great way to go about it. And you want to figure out that you’re making storage solutions for the right amount of your stuff, then I’m gonna talk about mid-century vintage versus more modern updated, mid-century inflected versions of storage styles, both aesthetically and in the approach that we take to where we’re putting things away and how we’re housing them. 

So this will be a little bit of a if you want to be a more of a time capsule person, how to think about this. If you’re looking for more of an update approach, how to think about it. And then I’m going to dive into a variety of spaces around your house and talk about some of the specifics, pros and cons, uh background needs, types, benefits of storage solutions for kitchens, for entryways, both front and private, for uh bathrooms, for bedrooms, for basements, for living areas, and more. So I will be talking about storage in so many different ways. 

Throughout the season, I’ll probably point to a bunch of handy resources. Certainly for like kitchen storage ideas, I’ll point you towards some resources, uh both free and paid, that I have for kitchen design solutions. But in general, an overall uh free resource that’s gonna be helpful for this season is the guide to mid-century storage solutions that I’m putting together to match this episode, specifically walking you through this master plan process focused on storage that we’re going to cover today. 

So you can grab that from the show notes page, which is gonna be midmod-midwest.com/2601, or you can go straight to midmod-midwest.com slash storage, and you will get that guide. It’s also going to link to a Pinterest board I’ve put together with a bunch of great image posts collected from across the internet showing both vintage and modern update versions of successful storage solutions for all of these different parts of the house. 

So if what really helps you is visual references that are photographs, go check out those, that collection of organized boards, um, which will be linked to in that storage free resource. So, uh, one more thing before I dive in, which is to say if you are planning to work with Mid Mod Midwest to solve some of your storage problems, or to and to address the rest of your home improvement needs to set a master plan for everything you want to do to your house over the next decade, or to kick off a remodel that’s going to happen in the next year. 

Next year, certainly not in this calendar year, now is a really great time to get your ducks in a row for a 2026 remodel because that’s how booked our we are on our design calendar right now. Our next signed project is gonna start in January, I believe, um, from our perspective. 

Now that’s to say, when we when we meet with a new, when I meet with a new person, we have a conversation about whether we’re a good fit for you, you’re a good fit for us, whether your house fits our criteria and our design services and style will best suit you, and we agree to move forward. 

Your process will begin almost immediately because we start by assigning some design homework. Questions like, how do you live in your space? Some of them will feel related to storage needs. Where do your things accumulate? How, where the what parts of your house do you spend the greatest parts of your time? How do you feel about those places? 

That part and the documentation of the house, floor plan, information, photographs, et cetera, plus the boiling down of what mid-century style to you means, all begin as soon as we’ve got our proposal signed. But our design process won’t be beginning before January for any projects that we have not already got on our design calendar. So if you want to get work done in 2026, design also takes time. We’d love to have your design drawings set for spring 2027, but the time to get started is now. As they say, the right time to plant a tree was 50 years ago, and the next best time to plant a tree is today. So um, if you’re thinking about working with us, then reach out and say hello. 

Also, we are still on the hunt for the perfect new addition to our team. If you have been dreaming of working on designs for improving mid-century homes, if you love to draw mid-century buildings and think about how they could be done better, if you are just curious about what it might be like to work with for Mid Mod Midwest, reach out on our careers page. I would love to hear from you about your curiosity, your experience, your background, your love for mid-century. We are trying to grow our mighty but small team, and we’d love to hear from you about your experience. Or if you know someone who might be a good fit for working with our design and illustrating team, pass them this information. 

Okay, let’s dive right on in and start talking about the way to solve a storage problem. It is so easy to go from I feel a frustration to I’m looking for solutions. This is what drives people directly to Pinterest, first thing, to look at how other people’s entryway or kitchen or bathroom looks. This is why people rush out and buy storage furniture to sort of cram things into without having quite matched the available resources to their needs. 

But in reality, we’ve got to start with the right questions. And I begin every design process with a lot of information gathering. I want to talk to my clients about the way that they shop. Are they habitual pick up something on the way home and then make it into dinner people? Or are they a Costco family? Do they have crafts or other storage-demanding hobbies, woodworking, quilting, Lego, puzzles? What helps you, a potential client, live best with your stuff? Do you like to see it arranged around you because seeing it gives you a sense of pride or peace or reminds you of your favorite thing you’ve accomplished? Or does seeing a bunch of objects around you create noise in your brain? Is it chaotic? Is it always better to have everything tucked tidily away behind a cabinet door? 

Throughout this season, I’m going to talk about the ways that mid-century homes sometimes have incredibly clever, desirable storage solutions that we should reach back in time and connect to, and sometimes then in the ways that they are totally lacking and we can completely improve upon them. 

So while we settle in for this next series of episodes, I’m going to constantly return to this first episode of the season, which is to ask about what problem we’re solving before we try to solve it. What’s going on in your household as it stands, what’s going on in your life, the way you’re living it, what would you like it to look like? And from there, we can throw a spaghetti at the wall and try to solve specific problems. 

Before I dive in on the process you should think about, questions to ask yourself as you go through a storage solving process, I want to caveat that storage does not necessarily or does not only mean built-ins, but I’m going to spend a lot of time talking about built-ins this season. In fact, in my head, I was kind of thinking this as the mid-century built-in season. But that’s not necessarily true. 

Um, this, as I was pondering how to begin this, I thought of all the way back to my high school experience, I was on the robotics team, and a crusty old guy in the shop who volunteered to support us had a saying, which he often repeated, which is, with a hammer in your hand, everything looks like a nail. I’ve said that on the podcast before. From him, it was a reminder to us to think outside of our most easily reached for solution. 

He had a bunch of those helpful phrases, some of which were quite contradictory, like he’d pull, perfect is good enough when he wanted us to keep going on something, or good enough for the girls we go out with if he wanted us to wrap it up and get the hell out of his shop at the end of the day. 

And you know, yes, there were also girly calendars on the wall in that shop, and I think I was the first girl he’d ever had on the robotics team in his experience coaching. He was not quite prepared for it. But going back to the hammer and the nail, this is true. And I will just tell you that my approach as an architect is very hammer-oriented. I will always try to solve every problem with architecture. I’m gonna look for a way to look with a structure, to tuck a beautiful, clever built-in into negative space, to recommend that every storage solution throughout the entire house be handled by the one consistent cabinet shop so it can have this beautiful, smooth, coordinating grain and stain and design language, the material language of the house all ties together effortlessly. 

But that’s not absolutely necessary. Not every storage solution needs to be solved with beautiful, expensive built-ins. Sometimes the solution is furniture to attractively conceal your items. Um you can source vintage and add an era of instant authenticity to your otherwise flipped and white painted house. Sometimes the solution is just a bunch of wireframe shelves lining the walls of your basement with neatly organized plastic storage tubs along them. 

Um, so feel free to take this advice when I talk about built-ins as one thing you could do, and know that you have many alternatives. So we’re going to solve the right problems by asking the right questions first. Friends, you’re not shocked, but I’m going to talk to you about how we should use a master plan method approach here. 

Yes, you need a master plan for your entire house before a remodel. And we can also use master plan thinking specifically to look only at your storage issues. For anyone who has forgotten, for if you’re rusty or if this is somehow the first episode of Midmon Remodel you’ve ever listened to, the master plan method is the 5D method for planning a remodel in the right order so you ask the right questions first and answer them thoroughly afterwards. 

The three pre-designed steps to gather insight into the situation are Dream, which asks what’s important to your life, discover, which digs into what’s going on in the house itself, distill, which focuses your style, what your mid-century aesthetic is for yourself. Once you’ve done that, you can move forward into creative problem solving in draft, the step where you try to explore as many possibilities as possible before you settle into what you will actually do with develop and focus mindfully on the solutions that solve all the problems you have at a scale that fits your life and your budget and your energy level. 

As always, if you’re thinking about the big picture of a master plan process, go over and check out my free class, Planning a Mid-Century Remodel to Fit Your Life and Budget, which is an hour-long uh recording of a live event that I do occasionally to walk someone through this entire process. So the master plan approach to your whole house is key to a successful remodel, but this thinking works at every scale. 

I use it when I’m standing in the aisle of a home goods store debating between two products and feeling a little worn out about choices. I speed run a micro master plan process to help focus my decisions. What helps my life in this case? What does the space, the house, need? What are the style through line elements that connect with other parts of the house? What could I choose based on what’s available in front of me or everywhere in the internet in the world? And then what’s the best choice out of all of that? I can sometimes do it as quickly as it just took me to say those five steps. 

And what this often turns up for me is that I can narrow the process right down and pick something in front of me, or hold up my hands and back away slowly from an impulse purchase that I, in fact, did not need at all. So let’s take this and think about how storage solutions can fit into the framework of the master plan. When we start with dream, this is always going to be an internal process. You’re making mental lists of your hobbies, your cooking style, the way you like to stock up on spares at Costco, versus knowing that you are a person who wants to go to the store on the way home from work and pick out tonight’s meal. 

It doesn’t need to be grander or more complicated than this. Reflecting on what makes you different from everybody else is important to figure out how you fit or don’t fit into the storage solutions of your existing house. If this helps, you can also think about how well or awkwardly you fit your things into various rental spaces of your youth or into other previous houses you’ve lived in, or the one you’re living in right now. 

Now, some of these questions are less important to you to ask yourself, although it doesn’t hurt to just stop and think about, you know, what what are my habits that create storage needs? But they’re very important questions to answer and to be able to clearly share with any designer you may enlist in the aid of your remodel. Because while it is obvious to you, knowing whether you’re a shoes-on or a shoes-off household is not obvious to everyone else unless you tell them and it makes a big difference to storage. 

Does all of that need to happen at the entry transition zone, or are shoes primarily stored in each person’s room where they get taken off during the evening? So doing a little ruminating on how your lifestyle relates to things is very important. And also, as I said earlier, one of the questions that I always like to talk to my clients about as I’m preparing to do a master plan for them is how much they want to see, how much do you want to see all of your belongings around you visibly versus how much do you want them all to be closed away behind drawers? Behind doors or drawers. 

Now, the next step in the 5D process is to discover. And in the case of storage solutions, dream and discover really can go hand in hand because what you’re looking for is trouble spots, and you’re gonna see them very visibly around your house as you go around your house and take stock of what storage you have, especially if any of it might be sitting empty or is poorly used, and separately, the places where things are piling up because there is not sufficient storage. 

I’m going to tease a solution here that will come up many times through the season. Um, a simple framed closet. You know, like the kind of space, it’s a tiny room with a door. Uh you open the door, and inside is a two foot deep and two or three or four foot wide space with a single hanging rod and a shelf above it. This kind of closet is the builder basic most common default storage unit in a mid-century house, and it is notoriously underused storage volume. 

It’s really hard to properly fill that space up and still have access to all of the things inside of it. So, one of the steps in the discovery process is going to be to open every closet door in your house and see how much empty volume is in there. How fully loaded is the upper shelf? Is the hanging rod space totally used? What about the space underneath the hanging clothing? What’s on the floor? Is it easy to reach in and see everything you want and grab it, or is it kind of a mess with jumbled objects blocking each other from view? 

Similarly, you can go downstairs if you’ve got a basement, peek into the attic if that is a place where it’s safe to store things in your climate, or out to the garage if you’ve got one of those and take stock of empty storage volume. How big are your unfinished spaces? And do you use them for anything? If your kids are playing floor hockey in your back basement, then there’s not any possibility to fill it up with storage, as there is if the only thing that ever happens back there is you walk through it to get to the laundry machines. 

Um if my bringing up the idea of storage in a back basement room immediately triggers you, no, Della, I don’t have room for the stuff that is my everyday, always touched stuff, then I would ask you, what’s being stored in the closet and storage furniture inside your main spaces? Is all of that stuff daily necessary stuff, weekly necessary stuff, or even seasonally necessary stuff. Perhaps some of that could be shifted to more out of the way locations to free up space in your close to daily life areas. 

So you’re took you’re taking stock of what is the empty, if any, capacity of your house. And this is your answer will vary depending on how jam-packed you are, how long you’ve been in the house, um, how much you are an accumulator of things, how carefully you can pack things away. But you always want also want to see like where are where are the non-stored items piling? Um the best time to look for this is when things have been going a little screwy lately, not right after you’ve just cleaned up everything for company. 

Although if you clean up everything for company and then wait a week, you’ll definitely have an opportunity to see, okay, where are the where’s the fresh clutter? Um, but you’re gonna look through the house for where is there a pile that doesn’t belong? Where is there uh a sort of things piled on top of a storage unit as well as sitting inside of it? Where is there a pinch point where you’re shuffling around, uh scrabbling through a drawer to find the one of an item that you have too many of stuck into one small space? 

Some of these things, if you’re anything like me, will slowly become a little invisible to you over time. And so you’re gonna kind of have to do fresh eyes. This is definitely a place where you can walk around and look at your house, but if you’re like, I don’t know, everything is messy and I hate all this clutter, and you’ve gotten into the bad habit, well, or perhaps the self-preservation habit, of just kind of not looking at your hotspots, at your clutter piles, it can be also helpful to take photos of the room. 

It’s wild to me whenever I’m taking a picture of a space in my house. I’ll look at it, be like, yeah, that’s pretty clean, the dust is all gone, it looks good. I take my camera out, take my phone out, take a snap, and I’m like, okay. So there is an out-of-place piece of junk on that coffee table, and there’s a cord visible, and the curtains are crooked, and I immediately in the photo see like five things that are wrong with this picture that I didn’t notice in real life. 

So if you’re having trouble thoroughly documenting where these spots sort of pop up, then taking photos of your house might be good documentary evidence against yourself, what you want to improve upon. Uh, a nice before picture, if you will, and also will help you identify where are your most troubling clutter spots. There are some of these, though, that need no reflection whatsoever to be like, I can’t stand coming into my entry one more time and tripping over the giant, unorganized pile of shoes in there. It has to be changed. 

So, again, as I often say about the dream stage, this does not have to be rocket science. This is just knowing what you know and making a note of it. All right, dream, discover, distill. This is slightly jumping the gun, but let’s think about it as a treat to yourself. What is the ideal aesthetic of your storage? Should it be time capsule vintage? And if so, from what sort of style or era or micro note inside the mid-century years are you looking for? Or should it be more of an update? Um, more visible, more open shelving versus more closed? Are you looking for uh an opportunity to blend a light wood Scandinavian style into your older, darker amber mid-century home? 

If you’re doing a full pass storage overhaul of your entire house, this is an opportunity to bring in a new consistent material in such a way that feels very tied together and purposeful and can add a beautiful layer to the material palette of the house. If, on the other hand, your house has already been subject to somebody else’s bad comprehensive remodel in the 70s, the 80s, the 90s, or a flip in the last few decades that has scoured out most of its original built ins and woodwork and character, this isn’t. 

Opportunity for you to feed two birds with one scone and really plan thoughtful storage solutions that both declutter your life and also bring back in a mid-century flavor to multiple rooms in your daily life. Only once you’ve gone through those three steps can you get into the hunting down clever ideas. 

This is where we get into draft. This is where you turn to Pinterest and look for other people’s clever ideas. This is where you check out what influencers are recommending on TikTok, on Instagram, etc., on YouTube. This is where you might find like a 90s published Better Homes and Gardens guide to storage ideas around your house. And the style of them will be completely, I don’t even know what blonde wood or white painted everything. But you’ll find some glarely clever answers to the questions that you’ve already been asking. 

If you’re looking for a suite of my own solutions to some of these problems, one place to get started finding good storage ideas for every space in your house is to just wait and keep on listening to the rest of this season. But you can also go back and check out a bunch of previous mid-mod remodel podcast episodes, case study blog posts, videos on the Mid-Mod Midwest YouTube channel where I sometimes show examples. 

Or if you’re focused on one specific part of your house rather than a comprehensive sort of solution, you might want to check out one of my several past live mid-century design clinics. I’ve done design clinics on kitchens, on owner suites, which is bathrooms and bedrooms, on additions, which covers a lot of living room space, on exterior spaces, which include sometimes garages and carports. 

So there are storage suggestions built into each one of those clinics. Those recordings are available on the courses page of my website. And yeah. The ideas that you’re looking for here do not necessarily have to come from or be planned for mid-century houses. This is where you can get a good idea from your neighbor. You can go down to several local cabinet shops and look at their showroom for clever storage solutions. You can surf the pages of Plykea or Kerf Kitchens and see what clever little storage solutions they suggest. This is where you start to accumulate a laundry list of wish list sort of items. I wish I had a pullout drawer for this, and I wish I had a tall sort of can storage pantry pullout in my kitchen. And I wish that the trash cans in the kitchen were in drawers rather than as a unit sitting outside of them. One drawer for trash and recycling would be amazing. 

This begins as a laundry list of ideas. And ultimately, as you shift from the draft stage where you’re testing out possibilities to the develop stage where you’re whittling it down, you’re boiling it down to the actual choices you want to incorporate in your home at the price point in the stage, in the steps that will work for your life. 

And with a cohesive vision that’s going to help you do a solution here that leads to a solution here that helps you lead to a solution here, then you’re getting into creating your action plan. Incorporating all of your storage solutions into the design package that you hand off to a general contractor also lets you then give them a little, not too much, but a little of your pre-designed thinking of your needs, your lifestyle, your house’s problems, and your taste, and asks them to input some more of their own clever storage ideas. 

And it also just helps you make sure that what you’re getting from them is not just the default, but is specific to you and to your family and to your life. So, for a quick overview of the steps of the applying the master plan method to specifically storage solutions, don’t forget to download my free guide, which you can grab at the show notes page or at midmod-midmas.com/slash storage, and it’ll stay with you and be a good companion to you throughout the rest of this season. I am going to be back next week with more on specifically how to think about the stored objects in your home. 

I’m not going to call them all clutter, but if you feel like they are clutter, like anything you own feels clutter-y, we’ll talk about how to address that. But for the moment, I am still, at the time of this episode airing, in the active process of recording the rest of this season. 

So if there are specific areas of your mid century house where you have a particular storage struggle, this is a great time to reach out to me on social media or to drop an email to Della at midmodest.com and tell me about what you’d like to hear on the rest of this podcast season. That’s all for now. Catch you next time, MidMod Remodelers.

My Must Have Bath Resources

21 min readLet’s wrap up the bathroom season with all my best advice.

Earlier in this podcast season we explored your bath remodel “why” and the dreams you have for your home. But there are some very practical reasons to remodel a bathroom.

Even a really great time capsule bathroom might need to change. (I know! I heard that gasp!)

But if you’re going to invest in a bathroom upgrade or take out original features you want to make sure you do it right.

Most of you reading this would move mountains to save a great original bath. And sometimes you can! But as I mentioned above, there are situations where a bathroom just needs to change. Like when:

  • There’s something going wrong in there. 
  • It’s not suiting your life properly.
  • Other spaces need to change around it. 

Let me elaborate.

Continue reading “My Must Have Bath Resources”

Your mid-century bathroom is a bit of a drama queen.

19 min readMid-Century bathrooms are pretty dramatic. They are complicated spaces with bunch needs jammed into a very small footprint.

A bathroom has to have storage, work surfaces, multiple plumbing fixtures, a variety of lighting…and it all has to look beautiful. PLUS it has house all of that in a space with fluctuating levels of humidity and temperature changes.

Today I’m pulling back the curtain on how to create a comfortable, healthy, code compliant bathroom without sacrificing the character of your mid-century home.

Listen Now On 

Apple | Spotify

Our techno-optimist “modern” mid-century ancestors often embraced technology at the expense of nature. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned from studying homes across the USA: relying solely on mechanical systems to replace natural light and air is a design mistake.

Continue reading “Your mid-century bathroom is a bit of a drama queen.”

The ideal number of bathrooms in a mid-century home

18 min readSo, how many bathrooms does your mid-century house really need?

Let’s start with some history. (You knew that was coming, didn’t you?)

Indoor plumbing has only been the standard for about the last 100 years. And early in that timeframe it was still far from universal. Mid-century homes were built during a massive infrastructure boom, but even then, most builder-grade ranches were designed with a single family bathroom. Like so many mid-century-house-related things, the real shift happened in 1954 with the introduction of the 30-year mortgage. These loans fueled bigger homes and higher expectations. By 1955, the “Parade of Homes” booklets were suddenly bragging about two-bath floor plans.

Fast forward to today. Current census data shows that only 3% of new homes are built with one bathroom or less. We’ve certainly added more bathrooms, but does “more” always mean “better”?  

Listen Now On 

Apple | Spotify

Continue reading “The ideal number of bathrooms in a mid-century home”

Practical Strategies for an Accessible Bathroom

19 min readTruth time. When most of us dream about updating a bathroom, we jump straight to gorgeous tile, sleek lighting, and the ultimate vintage aesthetic. And accessibility or other concerns about aging in place take a backseat…if they make it in at all. 

But thinking about accessibility in your bathroom before you need can big a huge win in the long term. Whether you’re planning to be able to stay in your mid-century ranch for decades, worrying about how you would deal with an unexpected injury, or thinking about potential resale value making your bathroom more accessible is a great investment.

Even if you are currently a hale and hearty person with zero mobility issues, planning for universal functionality is a massive win. Anyone can break a bone and age is coming for all of us. Plus there is always a serious dearth of accessible homes on the market. Any accessibility features you include add value and meet a need. And even a little strategic forethought will save you from style sacrifices or ripping out lovely materials down the road. 

Listen Now On 

Apple | Spotify

Continue reading “Practical Strategies for an Accessible Bathroom”

The Highest Bathroom Remodel Compliment with un.flipping

37 min readCan you create a mid-century style bathroom that is snazzier and sharper than the original…even after a sad, sad flip? Yes, you absolutely can, and today I’ve got the proof from Colin and Dana of @un.flipping. 

The highest compliment? Getting told “don’t you dare touch that time capsule bathroom” by people looking at your instagram account documenting the vintage style remodel!

The instagram account un.flipping documents the work Colin and Dana have done to turn back the clock on their 1963 house. They’ve stripped away much of a bad flip; bringing back a gorgeous wood-grain kitchen, recreating a cozy basement den, unpainting brick details.

And most recently, Dana and Colin turned their attention to the owner’s bathroom. Their bath project is so startlingly gorgeous and time-capsule perfect that people regularly comment on Instagram telling them, “Don’t touch that vintage bathroom!”—not realizing they built it completely from scratch.

I just sat down with Colin and Dana to talk all about how this stunning owner’s suite transformation came to life. 

Listen Now On 

Apple | Spotify

Continue reading “The Highest Bathroom Remodel Compliment with un.flipping”

The Bathroom Saga with Aletha VanderMaas

49 min readJudging previous owner’s questionable renovation choices is great fun! It’s so satisfying to rip into those trendy, out-of-period “upgrades” that feel so wrong for your charming mid-century home. Less fun? When you realize that the person who made those decisions is YOU, ten years ago.

Even those of us who are now professional mid-century designers have skeletons in our closets (and in my case, basements). My fellow designer, Aletha Van der Mass of True Home Restorations, and I have both walked that path. And now we both spend our time helping others avoid making the same mistakes. 

So today, in the interest of community (and laughter through tears) we are both sharing our shameful home renovation stories. 

Continue reading “The Bathroom Saga with Aletha VanderMaas”

Why are you updating your bathroom?

20 min readWelcome to Season 25…all about bathrooms! If you’re craving a tactical, “do-this-then-that” checklist, hold tight. We’ll get there. But before I talk about materials, layouts, or fixtures, I want to start with something more fundamental. Philosophy. Today I’m challenging you to stop asking how and start asking why.

Our productivity economy constantly bombards us with advice focused on how to do a thing. How to remodel faster, how to do it cheaper, and how to get the current look.  

But when you prioritize how above all else, you are likely to fall into trendy choices that don’t fit your house or how you live in it. How pressure pushes you to act fast based on aesthetics rather than need. You could end up ripping out vintage elements that you don’t yet appreciate (or even a not so great update) and replacing them with “improvements” that feel dated the moment you’re finished. And then you want to do it all over once you’ve had some time to explore the “why”.

Listening to Tara McMullin’s What Works podcast recently, I was struck by a quote from philosopher Alan Jacobs, “We live thinly in our instant, and we don’t know what we don’t know.”

Focusing strictly on the how of anything, especially a remodel, often ends with us value-engineering the soul out of our homes. But when we start with the why, the entire horizon shifts.

Bathrooms are often the first rooms to fall victim to our best intentions. Because they are small and discrete, it’s easy to hire a contractor to simply “replace-in-place” or to tackle a right-sized early DIY project yourself. Heck, I’ve said (and stand by my opinion) that a bathroom is the perfect first project. But if you tackle it without considering what will work for your home and your life, it may end up being your biggest remodeling regret. 

So how do you find your why? By asking questions. By living in your home. By exploring possibilities. 

What’s your why? (It could even be a combination of things)

  • Is it preservation? Could you keep that charming 1950s tile and just update the vanity to make it more functional for your kids?
  • Is it longevity? Do you want to focus on making choices that will still look good in 20 years and how do you avoid chasing a trend that will feel tired by next spring?
  • Is it stewardship? Your mid-century home has already stood for 70 years. How can you make choices that allow it to last another 70?

One way to avoid how and figure out why is to slow down. I’m a huge advocate for a slow remodel. This doesn’t mean the project takes longer than you want. It means you aren’t rushing and making compromises just to get it done now.

Whether you’re in your forever home or planning for a five-year horizon, your house is going to serve as someone’s home for years to come. When you treat your renovations as an act of stewardship, you save style and stop participating in the “replace everything” cycle that plagues the remodeling industry.

This season, we are going to dive deep into:

  • Regrettable choices (and how to fix them).
  • Tight-space logistics that actually function for modern life.
  • Preserving vs. Updating: How to identify those vintage gems that should be kept at all costs.
  • Conversations with experts like Aletha of True Home Restorations, who shares how she adjusted her own past remodel choices to better fit her home.

Before you pick out a single tile or faucet, I invite you to do some renovation philosophizing. Let’s make sure the changes you make to your bathroom are actually worth it for you and your home.

Listen Now On 

Apple | Spotify

Resources 

And you can always…

Read the Full Episode Transcript

This season of the Midmon Remodel Podcast is going to be all about charming bath updates. But I’m not kicking us off with a handy how-to advice episode. Instead, let’s do some renovation philosophizing. Because the most important question in any remodel process is why. And yet most of the advice we find is focused on how and what. 

Starting from a clear why is the first step in my mid-century master plan process because coming back to what matters is how we determine what to do at every stage, even in a space as small and specific as a bathroom. Why we choose one change over another, preserve a vintage surface here, invest in a bigger modification there, consider sourcing a more durable fixture in this spot. All of these questions will help us plan a remodel that really works well for us. Hey there. Welcome back to Midmod Remodel. 

This is the show about updating MCM homes, helping you match a mid-century home to your modern life. I’m your host, Della Hansman, architect and mid-century ranch enthusiast. You’re listening to episode 2501. And really, welcome back to Mid Mod Remodel, because we’ve had a little break between seasons, and now we are diving in with season 25. 

We’re going to be focusing on mid-century bathrooms, how to update them, how to love them, what happens if you feel like you’ve made a mistake on your bathroom in the past. I’m going to have some practical, how-to, how-based advice, some common recommendations I make for my clients and students, uh, conversations with fellow members of the mid-century remodeling space on what we’ve done in our bathrooms and whether we regret it, spoiler alert, sometimes we do. 

And that’s something I want to talk about in the broader sense, how to avoid today. But before I get into that, a quick bit of business. If you have larger, grander mid-century remodeling plans floating around in the ether right now, then I want to tell you that right now is a great time to start getting your ducks in a row. Because we’re remarkably booked out this year. We’ve had a very busy spring and looking to have a very busy summer. 

The next open design spot in our queue is for this fall. So that means that actually, even though it’s the middle of summer right now, I think that if you’re hoping for a casual deepened timeline, more on that later in this episode, to think about what you might want to do, prioritize, plan, perfect, and then make your plans happen in the next year, then reaching out right now to chat about a master plan is the perfect opportunity because it means you’re going to get to get cooking on your design homework. That starts right away, no matter how long our design queue is. 

The questions that we ask our clients to think about are always infused with a lot of why. What matters to your family, what’s going to be really important to you, what have you loved in other places? Um, that I just said the word what a lot, even though I said why. Really basically, we’re seeking out what are the underlying desires you have. Why will making a change to your house make an improvement to your house? Uh, there we go. 

Back to the why questions. But anyway, you’ll begin cooking on that design homework right away. And then in a few months, jumping in with our master plan kickoff meeting in October, very possibly September for the next person that signs with us. But really, that’s only if we work remarkably fast or if one of our currently scheduled clients needs a pause in the meantime. And then getting your design schemes back probably in November. 

That will give you a perfect jumping-off point to pull together a final set of schematic drawings with us and then get onto the build calendars of your best local contractor option for the new year. So, yes, it is tank top weather right now. It is summer, it is air conditioning time. Um, but it’s time to look forward to cozy sweater season and getting things on the calendar for construction in the spring. If you’re planning horizons to stretch even further than that, then good for you. I’m about to explain why I think that is a fabulous idea. 

But the right time to start dreaming, to prioritize, to research, to contemplate, to kick things around from a design perspective, to see what might work best for you and for your home is always right now. So, long story, not that short. I would love to chat with you about what you’ve got in mind for your house, your questions about what’s possible, plausible, how a master plan process works, and more in a Zoom call. 

So you can go on over to the work with us page at midmodash midwest.com to apply to work with us, and we’ll get back in touch with you to set up a call as soon as we’re free. Anything else to share at the moment? No, I don’t think so. I think we can go on from here. As always, you will find show notes with links to the references I’m going to make and a transcript of the episode at the show notes page, midmodest.com/2501. 

So I was recently listening to an episode of Tara McMullen’s excellent What Works podcast. If you are not already familiar with her, she generally focuses on the care and feeding of small businesses, or maybe the care and feeding of small business owners. So obviously, her topics apply to me running and creating Midmond Midwest, but I think of her more as a kind of modern-day philosopher. She’s considering always the way that technology, media, societal expectations, and more affect the choices that we make in our lives and specifically in our work. Her website, whatworks.fyi. What a great web extension, by the way. It’s very easy to check out. So go scroll around. 

I was specifically inspired by listening to her recent episode, I think June 4th, on rethinking the long term. She begins it with a quote from Alan Jacobs to wit, We live thinly in our instant, and we don’t know what we don’t know. She spends the intro to this episode talking about our penchant for focusing on how in all of our modern life, and certainly in like the productivity economy. We’re always thinking about how something could be done. And when we focus on how, we can value engineer it. We can make it go faster, we can make it cheaper, we can make it smoother, we can make it shinier. We can do a lot of things that don’t actually get at what it is worth to us. 

And that is very contrary to a lot of the things that I try to pursue in my life, and certainly that I try to do in my work of helping homeowners to plan good remodels for mid-century homes. So she puts up against that, or I think she’s taking it from this philosopher, Alan Jacobs, the question of why or why-based questions, as opposed to how-based questions, and how that can really shift your whole approach. When we think just about how, we focus on tactics, on what we could do. But why is a question that opens up broader horizons and certainly seems more in line with my philosophy of remodeling. 

Taking a bigger, a wider, uh pulled back approach allows us to be more interested in long-term goals, in the way that our home contains us, for example, rather than strictly what it looks like. Particularly how questions in a remodeling context often come down to what’s possible to change about our homes quickly, easily, cheaply, and right now. 

So I listened to this episode back in June, and I was immediately on fire over how I could translate it into the context of this podcast. And then I thought, oh no, the next season is going to be about bathrooms and bathroom remodels. That is perhaps the most tactical, the most how-based component of a house. You know, when I, as a designer, when I sit and look at a bathroom that a client has given me their marching orders for, the first question I have is, you know, one of dimensions, one of logistics. What’s what’s possible to fit into this space? It’s a very, very, very how-based question that I ask about it. 

But you know what? That’s not true, actually, because I always begin from a conversation with my client about what is the purpose? You know, are they are they trying to make separations between family spaces and public spaces? Uh uh, is the bathroom a place where multiple people are trying to cycle through in the purpose of a morning? Is it a refreshing space or a practical logistical space? I am interested in the why of my clients’ bathrooms. 

And I think actually, in that sense, this is the perfect season to kick off with an episode addressing the broader philosophical nature of the room. Bathrooms are perhaps one of the easiest places to make those quick how decisions. They are, I could just as easily say, one of the easiest places to make bad decisions. 

Bathrooms and kitchens are one of the most commonly remodeled parts of a mid-century house, probably of any house, and unsurprisingly, the most commonly botched parts. They are vulnerable to a combination of quick flipping ideas, replacing something old and slightly worn with something new and cheap that looks good by virtue of being fresh and then will quickly fade and fail, and also by being victims of fast fashion in the fashion sense, that is falling into whatever is the current trendy mode for doing your kitchen or bathroom. 

This combination of the two things leads people to replace and landfill beautifully crafted mid-century pieces, even machine-made ones from the mid-century that were solid materials and intended to be maintainable and repairable with cheaper substitutes that hit a moment in time precisely, or maybe even imperfectly, as an inexpensive knockoff, and then immediately begin the process of falling out of fashion and falling into disrespair, starting a stopwatch of inevitability, of disposability at the moment of their installation. 

So that this is this it’s it’s so painful and frustrating to me. And I could just as easily talk about this in terms of kitchens. When I meet a new client, the first touch point we have is a contact form that I ask people to fill in, and they will give me their address and often share some photos of the relevant areas of their house. Even if they don’t, I can often check out the house on Zillow. I also spend some time on online house listings in my own neighborhood and in other places, or when I walk by a house and like the outside of it and want to know what’s happening on the inside of it. 

Even in a house that is generally a pretty great time capsule, has its original siding still intact, has some obviously visible, charming living room spaces that I can see through the open picture window area. Um, when I when I look at the listing photos, when I see what’s happening on the inside, the most common areas to have been remodeled are always going to be the kitchen and bathroom. Those spaces are hard wearing, they take a lot of abuse and use in terms of life. They get beat up on, they have plumbing accidents in them, but also they just they are victims of fast fashion. They are victims of how-based thinking. 

So I could talk about this in terms of kitchens, bathrooms fall into the same category, and they are perhaps even more at risk of the kind of thinking that says, it’s just a small room. We’ve got two bathrooms, so we can use one while the other one gets done. We’ll just hire a bathroom remodeling company to come in and, in theory, upgrade the space, do the space. And that typically means a replace-in-place remodel with little thought to the best arrangement of space or the current leads of the family. 

And I see it all the time. The result is not great. The thinking that anything new is better than everything old hits over and over and over again. When I visit a vintage home as part of touring an estate sale, when I meet a new client and see what’s going on in their house, or even when I just scroll on Zillow, I see this. When you focus only on the questions of how you could remodel a bathroom, you will inevitably fall into a trap of removing and replacing as much as possible of the original space. If you begin from a question of why you are remodeling a bathroom, you may arrive at the same point ultimately. 

You may decide that the layout of the space is awkward or inadequate to your needs, however. You may decide that there are elements of the original bathroom that are worth preserving that you want to, for example, um, something we suggested to a recent client. They had two complete time capsule bathrooms with relatively generous layouts, one with a pretty charming yellow tile setup, one with a pink and blue accent tile setup that wasn’t quite as beloved. Um, but they were looking at what needs to change in the house. 

The kitchen layout was dated and very hostile to their sort of family structure, but did they need to change the bathrooms? Not necessarily. They didn’t feel a pressing need to do that, and I didn’t feel a pressing need to recommend that to them. It did seem that the built-ins were a little worn out and they weren’t equipped with the kind of easily open and closable doors and drawers that are particularly handy for multiple kids going in and out of a space all day long. 

So we proposed that they could simply replace the vanity in place in such a manner that would keep all of the original tile. They could potentially keep their existing plumbing fixtures and just set them into a new countertop. The mirror could be replaced, and I didn’t love the way the light fixtures were oriented, but we could set all of that up. 

And because we weren’t going to move the major locations of pieces and we weren’t going to replace the tub or the toilet, we didn’t need to touch the tile. That could all stay. Thinking about the why of that space led us made a very conservative choice financially and a very preservative choice for the vintage charm in the house. And even if they change other parts of the house as they go along through this remodel, hanging on to that anchor point of preserving the original tile in that bathroom will help everything else feel a little bit more connected back to what’s going on in the lifeline, the lifetime of the house. Saves money, saves style. And it would be just as easy, I think, uh hiring a contractor without having gone through a design process, they would probably have walked through the house and checklisted, oh, there’s failing cabinets in this bathroom. Maybe this bathroom is due for an update. Let’s do the bathroom. And then rather than a charming but slightly worn 19 mid-50s bathroom in five years from now, they would have an already getting dated mid-2020s bathroom to deal with. The clock starts as soon as you do the work. 

Now, on the other hand, sometimes the why questions pertaining to a bathroom lead us to know that we’re probably gonna make some fairly aggressive changes to the layout. The division of sp of sort of bathroom core spaces between two different bathrooms are not allocated properly for the way that the house is going to be used today. I actually have two projects on the boards right now, um, one we’re just wrapping up and one we’re gonna be kicking off soon, that need more of that approach. That we’re gonna be testing, is there something we can do to help these bathrooms function better with their current division of shared bathroom versus owner’s bathroom? 

Or ultimately, is the way that the house is about to be used by its next occupants just gonna be so different? And the original division of spaces between two tightly packed bathrooms just awkward enough that it’s not worth preserving. We’re gonna test both things, but the question always comes up, and we will tell I’ll, you know, I’ll also be addressing sort of the kind of questions that come up when I chat with people often about bathrooms in a 30-minute design consult. Is it worth it to change up this bathroom? What will be gained? What will be lost? And in the balance of those two questions, is it worth it to do something as drastic as changing up layout, or should we try to work within the existing footprint, which gives us the opportunity to try to preserve, for example, existing tile? 

Um, in the case of a bathroom that has already fallen victim to an aggressive flipper-style remodel, the answer is nearly always that it is worth it to come back and at the very least substitute again some better quality finishes, fixtures, et cetera, for the choices made by someone who was only trying to pay cheaply for materials and sell the house to someone who could only see the value in something shiny or new, or even sadder, perhaps a homeowner who made choices for their own space based on the cheapness of the materials and assumed that it would feel like an improvement in quality simply because it was new. 

This is also a place where returning to a why-based philosophy will help us push back on the entire remodeling industry, which, like many other industries functioning under the general umbrella of capitalism, push us to do things quickly, cheaply, and sacrifice on quality. Instead, let’s think about put the slow food movement, the slow fashion movement. Um, I’m not too interested in a technical one-to-one comparison here, but just taking it as a as a metaphor, what does it mean to plan a slow remodel? 

Not one that takes a lot longer than you hoped, but one that isn’t about chasing quick fixes or patch jobs or making compromises to get something done now that doesn’t even ultimately serve the purpose that you set out to accomplish. If we’re gonna go to the trouble of making a change to our home, we want to feel like the change we’ve made is worth it. It’s worth our time, it’s worth our money, it’s worth our energy. And if doing it a little bit more slowly, if thinking about it for longer before we do it can make that happen, then yay, we get to push back on the system of constant marketing that is being pushed in our face by social media, by uh the home remodeling industrial complex, etc. Capitalism, basically. 

Now, the other piece of that capitalist equation that makes it hard for us as owners of mid-century homes who want to make good choices for them is that our lives aren’t necessarily as settled as we might like them to be. Some people have or choose lives where they know they will stay in one place and make other choices in their life around it. Others find ourselves moving for education, for employment, for family, for opportunity from one place to another across the country or out of the country. 

So it’s always easiest to make choices for your home in a long-term sense when the planning window for your life in the house is your life. When I work with a new master plan client who tells me that they’ve bought a house in a neighborhood that they want their kids to grow up in, that they’re planning for age and place details, that this house is near three or four of their family members, they think of this house as their forever home. It is very easy for me and for them to talk about the choices that they are going to make as investments, not in the financial value of the house, but in the life that they’re gonna live there. 

That means making choices that fit their personal preferences, uh, choices that should last, chosen with decades in mind, installations done with maximum care, finishes that are meant to endure. In other cases, folks that I work with know that they might not be able to commit to staying in the house for that long. We might be talking about improvements to make for a three-year or a five-year or a ten-year planning window. 

They want to make improvements to change it, to fix it up, to repair it anyway, but the planning math does change a little. In some cases, someone who plans to stay may find a reason that they must leave, and someone who assumes they’ll move on may end up staying in a house longer than they intended. When I bought my ranch and started changing it, I actually thought it was not going to be a long-term place for me. I was treating it a little bit more as an architectural project lab, and I definitely wanted to make smart choices for it, to infuse it with 

good design, both of a sense of personal and professional pride, if nothing else, and to enjoy the time I spent in it. 

But I admit, I do see the house differently now, both ten years into living in it, and knowing that my window of living here might be very long. So this is an important thing to know about your own circumstances and your relationship to your house. You don’t have to ponder it too deeply to know the answer, you can simply answer it. Do you think you are currently living in your forever home? Or do you have some pretty clear reasons to believe that your time in this house is temporary? 

Not for nothing, but also I’ve been in my house ten years and I’ve gotten 10 years older in the interim. The way that I think about longevity in my mid-40s isn’t the same way I thought about it in my mid-30s. But here’s the thing: no matter how long or short my lifespan is in this house, how long you plan to live in yours, the house is still going to be there. And the choices you make for it have the potential to last or not. This reminds me of a great conversation I had a couple of years ago with my friend Susan Holla of Make It Mid-Century. I’ll link to one or two of my conversations with her in previous podcasts in the show notes page. 

But we had a lovely conversation about how much we love mid-century homes and why it’s important to make good choices for them. And that honestly, there should be an element of altruism in an ideal remodel of a mid century home. There’s what we do for ourselves so we can enjoy our lives more, so we can feel comfortable and safe and convenient in our houses. But there’s also taking care of a mid century house and an act of stewardship. This house has been around for 70 plus years and could very easily last. 70 plus years again, or well beyond that. So, how can we make choices for our homes that will last? Not only through our own tenure, but beyond them. 

Now, this is not to say that you might not find yourself remaking some of the choices you made on your home in earlier years. My bathroom is a key example of a room I plan to touch again. I didn’t do much to it when I was first moved in. Um it and it it what didn’t have much to recommend it. It was mostly a replacement of 90s Home Depot light fixtures and uh vanity and etc. I removed the old man toilet with the power flush that’s had like a jet taking off and replaced it with a modern low-flow Toto flooring I liked better. 

But as I reflect on those changes now, they weren’t the most long-term thinking I could have done, and they were not really in keeping with the original style DNA of the house at all. Such is the nature of first home improvement projects. Here’s the thing. We’ve come back around to bathrooms specifically now. It is theoretically pretty easy for me to come back and do my bathroom again. Bathrooms are the smallest and most discreet object space in any house to be remodeled. 

And companies specialize purely in bathrooms. It’s possible to come in, take out all the fixtures, scrape off all the finishes, put them all back in fresh any day of the week. You can DIY it, um, or you can hire someone by pointing at a few pictures in their lookbook and making the most obvious of choices and update the bathroom to today’s standards and trends without thinking about it too much at all. But this is why I’m happy to talk about the concept of why versus how in a remodel at the kickoff of the bathroom season, because it’s a microcosm for the greater approach we take to remodeling our home. 

It is neither cheap nor easy to take on a remodel, no matter how quick and dirty you do the job. It’s going to cost money. It’s going to require breaking inertia, letting strangers into your house to make noise and dust. It will take a certain amount of time no matter how fast it goes. But far too often we prioritize spending a little less time, money, energy to make those quick choices for our house. And then we get to spend the next 10 years thinking, oh man, I wish I hadn’t done it that way. 

And I’m really going to have to come back around and do this bathroom again. We make quick choices when we should be thinking long term. So as I crack into the bathroom season and talk through the approach that I take as an architect to layout logistics and material finishes in a mid-century space, let’s frame all of it, not as a quick fix, but looking for a solution that can last as long as the house has already lasted. 

For those of us in mid-century homes, that means trying to imagine choices that we could make right now that would be good for another 70 plus years. Now, never say never, but I don’t think most of those choices are going to be found on allmodern.com. So stay tuned for another pithy, relatively focused season where we’re going to talk about bathrooms in the context of regrettable choices made in the past and how to fix them. Tight-space logistical issues, some of the original mid-century design moves that have just not landed as well with today and perhaps need adjusting, and some that are charming and should be preserved at all costs. Some fun history, some remodeling philosophy, because you know I can’t stop myself, some linked sketches and pictures. 

I’ve got a great conversation coming at you next week with my friend Aletha of True Home Restorations in Michigan. We’re going to talk about the personal choices that she and I made for our own homes and how she recently took on a remodel of her bathrooms. Again, not scraping them back down to scratch, but adjusting several of her original choices made shortly after she moved into her house while preserving some of the others. The result is really nice, and I hope you find some helpful advice there for anyone who’s listening to this that has made choices in their own home they don’t love anymore. 

So to come back around to the question of why questions versus how questions, there are so many things we can do to improve a space that actually make a difference that may or may not even show up in a lookbook of pretty bathroom updates, prioritizing wise investments in long-term maintenance, like a whisper quiet but super effective bath fan to make sure humidity doesn’t take your bathroom out earlier than it needs to be. 

I want us to focus on why and on the broader planning horizon of planning a remodel for your house that will last as long again as the house has already stood as a consistent theme for this season, even though the season’s theme is also the littlest, cutest, most sort of tile-finished spot in your house. Um, let’s talk about what it will mean to plan a slow remodel of a bathroom. And that’s it for today. You can find references in the show notes page. 

So links to past conversations I’ve had with Aletha of True Home Restorations, of Susan, of Make It Mid Century, and check out the excellent podcast of Tara McMullen, What Works, and some of the things she referenced in her June, ooh, what was it? Her June 3rd episode that got me thinking about all of this. There’s really not that much overlap. I kind of took the idea and ran with it into a different direction. So if you found today’s conversation interesting, you will find her separate podcast fascinating. And I will be back next week with more on making great choices for mid century bathrooms. See you then, mid mod remodeler.