In Lesson 1, you’ll come up with deep answers to the questions that will unlock your ideal remodel plan.  These answers will give you clarity, confidence, and ease as you move through your home update planing from start to finish.

In Lesson 2, we will consider how our homes really serve us.  My goal is to help you think outside the box of what you have … and what surface changes you want to make … to get at how you can craft a home update that will really align with your own needs. 

In Lesson 3, we are going to transition further from your idealized home and an assessment of your own needs into thinking about how those can meld with the house you have.  Specifically, you’re going to go on a tour of your own home and get a feel for how each part of it is working to meet your goals.

Module 2 has four lessons that cover how you can gather the home data you’ll need and pull it together in one spot.  In Lesson 1, we’ll discuss the things you can see and measure for yourself without any outside resources.  Let's take stock of your house!

In Lesson 2, we are going to be talking about the building and zoning codes that are most likely to come up when you update a mid-century home.  We’ll talk about electrical outlets, stair steepness, fire safety and more … 

In this lesson we are going to run down a list of helpful experts you may want to consult before you finalize your plans for a remodel.  Its likely that some of these ideas will prove more relevant to your project than others but at least one of these - a good home inspection  - is absolutely mandatory. 

The last lesson of module 2 is mostly for fun but could turn up some useful data.   I’ll walk you through several avenues of research for learning more about the history of your home. 

Module three.  This week should be all fun ideas.  As I’ve said before, when you are updating a Mid-century home … there is no reason to re-invent the wheel. 

Lesson 1 covers some of our homes’ most intimate spaces - our sleeping and bathing areas.  We ask a lot of our modern bedrooms and bathrooms - they need to be sanctum sanctorum, functional and beautiful.  Today I’ll walk you through a little of the history of how people have regarded these spaces both before and during the MCM period.  We’ll get into trouble shooting and problem solving. 

This second lesson is going to talk about cooking and eating spaces in your mid-century home.  The kitchen specifically needs its own lesson because it is one of the most complex, expensive and personally specific parts of the house. 

I’ll talk bit about kitchens over time and then the MCM kitchen specifically. It has some. .. quirks.  Then I’ll get right down to suggesting a few small, medium and large changes you can address to your kitchen. 

Lesson three covers the living and social spaces of the house.  What I talk about here can, in many ways, be equally well applied to a more formal living room AND to a cozy back of house or basement den /  rec room type space. 

As you’ve come to expect, we’ll talk about the history of this area of the house, how it works in the mid-century home context and what people can and perhaps should change about it.  This space of the house has a lot of thing you can do on a furniture and interior design level but I’m going to focus on bigger more architectural interventions as well.  The sky (or at least the roofline) is the limit here. 

outside.  We’ll look at how you can create outside spaces that flow nicely through to your interior.  And, I’ll re-address how you can open your interior to views and pathways out - including a few of the areas we’ve already covered like living and eating spaces. 

This lesson is going to walk you through establishing how involved you want to be in your own remodel from entirely DIY to completely turn-key hands off and how to decide if you are planning a one fell swoop comprehensive project or looking to break down a bigger plan into steps you can manage over the course of a few years or more. 

In this lesson I’m going to do a quick run down of several good ways to gather and organize your design ideas.  The most important part of an inspired remodel is to have some great ideas.  But the close second is to keep those ideas organized in a way that works for you (and your team be that your family , your designer or the people who will help you build it.)

Regardless of whether you plan and execute each step of your remodel on your own or seek out a competent expert to take over the management work you’ll need to do some comparison of people and prices along the way. 

To do that well you need a way to track information and make sure that you are comparing apples to apples when you make decisions.