fbpx

An Architect Chat – The secret to planning your Dream Remodel

27 min readWhen you find yourself in a remodeling time crunch, the most frequently skipped step in the process is actually the most essential part of any well planned and executed remodel.

Planning your dream remodel takes time. It takes introspection, at least. There’s no getting around that. But often, time is exactly what you don’t have. Life happens. You might need to move or have sudden changes in your family’s scope and scale. You might have an opportunity to take advantage of that requires fast action.

When you’re in a hurry, do you sometimes skip important steps?

Same!

So … when you find yourself in a remodeling time crunch, watch out for THIS!  Because the most frequently skipped step in the planning process is actually the most essential part of any well planned and executed remodel. 

And it’s actually  a really powerful way to SPEED UP your planning … if you do it right.  

Plus, it’s essential to liking the outcome.  Face it, taking time to Dream can mean the difference between your perfect remodel and a remodel that misses the mark. 

So when you need to plan fast – whether that’s a quick fix project or a whole house update … how can you focus up and to your planning quickly but … but well?

Start here:

Essential Steps in the Dream Phase

  • Think about what “home” means to you.
  • Identify meaningful places from your past and consider why they stay with you.
  • Reflect on your favorite places and on places that cause problems in your home. Why do they work well or not so well? What would it look like for a problem space to work better?
  • Visit each room of your house, trying to look with fresh eyes. Write down your thoughts and observations during this exercise. This “visiting tour of your house” can help you generate ideas to create your dream remodel.
  • Keep an eye out for places where clutter piles up. These are mismatches between your life and your space.
  • Use any special occasions or holidays to provide a new perspective on your house and how it could function better. 

This is exactly the situation that many of my Master Plan in a Month students find themselves in. To help them navigate planning a dream remodel at speed, I put together a four week series of encouraging chats.

The first chat included something I wanted to say to literally everyone – whether your remodel plans are going to take several years to mull over or if they need to happen several days from now. 

Once you’ve done the work of Dreaming share it with your contractor and other pros to help guide your remodel.  

In Today’s Episode You’ll Hear:

  • Why you should take time to Dream, even if you don’t have much time. 
  • How to Dream up your perfect remodel. 
  • Where to find opportunities to see your house with fresh eyes. 

Listen Now On 

Apple | Google |  Spotify

Resources 

And you can always…

Read the Full Episode Transcript

To plan a perfect remodel takes time. It takes introspection at least there’s no getting around that. But in some cases, a lot of time is just what you don’t have life happens. You might need to move or have sudden changes in your family’s scope and scale, you might have an opportunity to take advantage of that requires fast action.

So suddenly, you need to dive into changing your home without the time for that introspection. The less time you have, the more you have to use that time well, and when I talk to people about how to think about their home improvement plan, it’s the step that they are most likely to skip when time is short, ironically, is the most important the most essential part of any well planned and well executed remodel introspection. Hey there.

Welcome back to mid mod remodel. This is your show about updating MCM homes helping you match your mid-century home to your modern life. I’m your host Della Hansmann, architect and mid-century ranch enthusiast, and you’re listening to Episode 1712.

Now I found myself making this point again recently, for a specific audience. For my master planning a month mini course, I put together a four part a four week series of encouraging chats to walk them through the mindset they need to have while following the QuickStart lessons, workbooks and guides associated with that 30 Day Program.

I realized that the first of the four chats had something I wanted to say to literally everyone, whether your remodel plans are going to take you several years to mull over, or they need to happen several days from now. This is the piece that I would have everyone I cared about Be sure to cover and everyone who’s mid-century home I cared about.

So today I wanted to share it with you. I’m going to talk about the dream stage of the master plan in detail. And more than what it is why it’s the most important thing you should do when you’re planning in a hurry.

How you can both think about what’s important to you, and focus on how to quickly explain that to others, to the contractors, suppliers and subs, and even to the friends and family who when you’re planning quickly, you will depend on to help you brainstorm solutions for your challenges ASAP. So, you’ll get three quick exercises to think through about what’s important to your home now on an irregular but important occasion and in the future.

Plus, I’ll answer a student question about what it means to change your mind in the middle of a remodel plan, and how to loop your contractor in on the change. Spoiler alert, it will all turn out okay. Please enjoy this 30 minute pep talk originally delivered to the master plan in a month program.

And if you’re curious about that program, if you find it inspiring, and you’d like to hear three more talks on this topic, you’ll find them inside master plan in a month. This is the fast action version of my master plan process which you can realistically take on in just 30 days or less if you need to.

Or you can use the same steps to jumpstart a longer process and get yourself going over more days, but perhaps still a limited amount of time hours. The link for that is in my show notes, find them at midmod-midwest.com/1712. You’ll also find the transcript of this episode. And I hope you really enjoy it.

Architect chats, this is going to be a four part series that is meant to encourage the master plan in a month members among us for anyone who’s new here for everyone else. This is all about the master planning process. So we are going to be thinking about five d thinking.

Five d processes are always going to be about dreaming first, what are your priorities, discovering next what’s going on in the house itself, distilling, focusing your mid-century style drafting, considering options for what you might do and then developing, pulling together the documentation that’s going to pull you forward into a clearly executable plan for your team yourself if your DIY and or the various contractors and subcontractors and other design assistants who are going to help you get this done.

This is week one of four. If you’re thinking about master planning in a month, you’ve got four weeks to do it in and there are five steps. So obviously I’m going to start at the beginning and talk a little bit more about the dream process today. But I am also beginning with dream because this is the most essential step this is the one thing you cannot do without asking yourself the questions about what’s important to you.

What are your goals for the life you will lead in the house the way the house around you will shape you once you have shaped it are foundational and if you’ve got time for nothing else, this is the most important thing you can do with your energy. And we’ll go on to the other pieces as we go through the program.

Feel free to go at your own pace jump to the pieces that are important to you. But if you want to plan a remodel the right way, a plan to remodel is going to go as fast as possible. Once you really get started. I recommend you really dig in on dream. And so even though we’ve got five modules and four weeks, I would say spend this entire first week thinking about dream.

Now maybe you already have But I’m going to talk a little bit more about some of the exercises that we share. In the master plan in a month program, we share the first exercise that I give to everyone my own clients to the ready tree model students, and that is to write your ideal home profile.

Now, this, this task to identify what you need, so that you can share it is from an outside perspective, what sets you apart from other remodelers from the sort of hypothetical resale family resale value family that we think about when we worry about things like, a lot of my clients don’t really like the little half tub shower that they have in a mid-century bathroom.

They wonder, can I just take it out? Can I just have a shower? But what if it’s the only bath and a house? What about resale value? The thing is, more than half my clients asked me that question. And obviously the people that come to me are not a full, evenly spread out sample of everyone that lives in America and wants things for their home.

But I’m still willing to state that enough people in this era are sick of those half tub, half shower setups, that they won’t care. If you take the tub out of the house and resale value, that hypothetical average family may not be the next person that owns the house either. So that’s one example.

By the way, some other people love to bathe, that’s how they rest and they recreate and they restore themselves after the day is done or before the day starts, for those people were putting in soaking tubs. So even for that resale value family that wants a tub, they might just want a better tub.

Anyway, this is all coming down to the point of personalization. So from an outsider perspective, what you’re doing, when you’re thinking about the process of planning an extra people who are showing up Hi, welcome. Glad to have you here. So when you’re thinking about the process of what is what is important to you, when you’re writing your ideal home profile, you are thinking about how you’re going to share this with the world.

And you don’t have to share your written ideal home profile with anyone I mean, if you’re a masterplan client of mine, I will ask you to share it with me. But it is a good way to try to step outside of yourself. And think about what makes you different from the other people that your helpers and the remodel are going to be interfacing with.

And they don’t need to know all of your personal business. But it is going to help them to understand what you’re trying to get out of your house out of your life. If you can have a boiled down explanation of what your future life in this home will be that you can share with them to reinforce why you’re making the choices.

You want to avoid pushback and so that they can collaborate with you and helping you to generate good ideas, which again, for master planning a month, when we’re thinking about the fastest, most compressed possible design time, you’re going to want to reach out to other people, you’re going to want to be open to the ideas and suggestions of contractors of salespeople of your friends and family.

Because you don’t have time to mull it over and think about design possibilities from every possible perspective. They can only give you a good advice if you have framed your challenge well for them. So when you are reading your ideal home profile, you’re telling the story of your life, what sets you apart. Not what makes you unique necessarily, but what makes you different from an assumption to someone else.

There are actually three different conditions you want to think about as you tell that story of your life. And they have three rank order priorities. I’m going to talk about these in specific order because this is kind of how I think you should focus your energy, your attention the way you explain it. The first way to think about your life when you’re telling the story of it to someone else is your everyday existence.

This doesn’t have to just be weekdays workdays, it can be the weekends, but the things you do again and again and again, on a cyclical basis, you’re telling the story of what it’s like in your home to wake up and get out the door. Or if there are people in the household that don’t get out the door in the morning that work from home that can take children at home that spend the bulk of their time, their daily life in the house.

You want to think about the routine experiences of are you regularly hosting people, are you having dinner parties three nights a week with all your friends? Are you having the neighborhood block over to your house every Saturday night, if these are things that are happening on the regular basis, then they end up destroying your life in your ideal home profile in this everyday category.

This is the most important thing to think about when you’re designing your home. And you can break it down even further. You can think about where you are at different times of day which might let you give a single room dual purpose later when you’re thinking about solving problems. But right now, we’re making a list of the kinds of experiences you want to have in your home.

Maybe the kind you already have a need. Maybe the kind you only dream about having but the waking up the morning coffee, the getting out the door, the noon break, the early afternoon light the way you like to experience the evening when the family re gathers the way you like to go to bed at night. How that changes from weekday to weekend. These things are really important to know.

Well, this is what I want you to focus the primary energy of your remodel on the way you reconfigure spaces how you think about it. But there is another important category that I’m going to talk about next. And that is special occasions.

This might be holiday, or the holidays, if you celebrate the winter season holidays in some major way, it might be a time when family regular really comes when you have a regular annual whole family reunion.

Every July, they all show up your house, you put some of them up, some of them are in hotels, they’re coming in and out, there’s chaos all around. This is important to know. This is also important if you are for example, okay, I’m going to pull from a couple of clients here, the family gathering family, we’ve had a couple of clients often who are taking over a family home, that family home is the existing hub of major family gatherings.

So in two cases, we’ve had someone move into their grandparents home their grandparents had been extroverts hosters big extended family, and they were taking on the house, sometimes at a discount or sometimes just with the with a family understanding that people were going to be showing up at their house regularly, not every weekend.

Over the summer, we’re gonna have a host of kids and other adults, people swirling food, food printing being made by all sorts of people, people running out to the pool, showering, sleeping, napping, all these spaces need to be contained within the house. In another case, it was a little bit more lightweight, but they needed to have a social space for daytime gatherings of big local extended family all showing up.

So multiple sitting areas, social rooms, family rooms, they could all sort of interact, you could holler from one to another to start a conversation. But you could also set up kids in one corner, have a TV show playing and another adult conversation having another one could flow out to the patio space for summer overflow.

And one of the things we were working on in the remodel was making more space in the basement, that again, would be a place where a different level of energy noise volume could be happening at the same time. There’s a different kind of hoster that you might be. And it’s important to know the difference.

So if you’re having everyone over every weekend, that’s one kind of house that you need to create around it. Another case might be if you have international family who come or friends who come and stay with you for big chunks of time.

That’s a very different house shape requirement set of needs than someone who has a bunch of family over for daylight hours, every weekend. If you’ve got parents in laws, people of multiple generations coming and staying in your house with you for a month or six weeks at a time, you’re going to need more sound separation, more privacy places for people to sleep, but also places for people to bathe, maybe make their own morning drinks have some way separation time, this is a great way to sort of take the rough edges off of any potential family conflict.

So that’s not something that always occurs to everyone. I ask these questions to my clients when I meet them. And sometimes it’s something they’ve already volunteered to me in the intake forms that we go through and the other conversation we’ve had earlier. Sometimes it’s not so right in your ideal home profile as a way to step outside of yourself and think, what might someone else not know about me that my life needs, and therefore my house needs? These kinds of special occasions are important.

And actually, if you’re curious, I would point it towards a podcast episode. I’m not going to call it mine right now. But I think it was winter, maybe two years ago. So let’s call that 2022 December episodes.

Talking about how you can use the holidays specifically to plan you can think about while you’re hosting or you can do this this summer, if you have a family gathering, think about what are the pinch points in your house. While you’ve got people over where are you frustrated? Where is clutter accumulating? Where? Where are you bumping elbows with people? Is it too on spaces in your kitchen.

I don’t recommend you build an entire house that you remodel everything around those special occasions situations. But if you need more flexibility in your space, that’s something to definitely take on.

And then there’s a third category now this is perhaps the least prime, the least important for you to focus on. And that’s the future. What is the story of your life? 10 years from now, 20 years from now, 40 years from now, for people who know that they want to stay in a house, they are not hoping to change jobs. This is the place where their extended family is this is a great house, why would they ever leave it? If you know you’re building your forever remodel? You do want to think about the future.

And particularly for people in sort of the more shifting life stages if you’ve got if you’ve just coupled up and you’re hoping to have kids you’re having a big transition on the horizon. If you’ve got little kids imagine the future where they are more grown up. Is your house gonna work as well for toddlers as it is for teenagers and vice versa.

If you’ve got teenagers, what’s it going to feel like when you are an empty nester and if you are a working couple or single what’s going to feel like to live in your house when you’re retired.

Now one thing that is always a good idea is planning for some amount of accessibility in your remodel. It’s always a good idea to think about widening doorways, creating zero entry showers making space to move around a kitchen. Because you don’t have to age in place to need accessibility features. Anybody can slip on a banana peel and break their ankle any day any week. And so it’s nice to have a house that accommodates that. And since we live in mid-century houses, they’re often all on one floor.

So we’ve got a lot of room to build off, we already have our bedroom on one level, we already have our main services on one level. So if you just do a couple of other things, bringing the laundry up to the main floor, maybe not even now, which is planning for where that could happen in the future, you have future proofed yourself a little bit. That’s it.

Again, the order of priority is your daily needs, your special occasion needs and then the future because again, another mistake I think a lot of people can make when they remodel is to look too far ahead. And for example, parents with a couple of teenagers in the house to think about how they will remodel their house so that when their children are grown, coupled, and have kids of their own, there’ll be room for everyone to come back for Christmas.

You don’t need to plan for grandchildren you don’t have already. Grandchildren sleep on the floor, you don’t know if he will have grandchildren. That’s the future in a fuzzy imaginary way. But it is really important to think about those three categories. And to just run through them in your mind, you can do this again, when remember when time is short, this could be half an hour conversation.

This could be a meditative dog walk with, with your iPhone notes, app open or a notebook in hand so you can jot things down. Or it can be a week of deep conversations you have with your spouse or partner, it can be something you come back to over and over again, overtime, whatever amount of time you have to go deep into dream. Go deep into dream.

The other exercise, there’s actually three workbooks that I include within just the master plan in a month again, boils down to the most essential things you should think about and your five day thinking. I still have three exercises, and they are your ideal home profile, the visiting tour of your house, and the learning from your past exercises.

But today, I want to jump to that should be the third one I mentioned a second, the visiting tour of your house. When you are visiting your house. There’s a couple of different ways to go about this. And this doesn’t depend on your remodeling goals, personality, but on your brain chemistry, your preference for focus.

So as you look around your house and explore it, re familiarize yourself with it, try to see it with fresh eyes, you might choose to do this as a part of your daily life, particularly when you’re a hurry, it might just be put a notebook in your back pocket and carry it with you at all times. And when you’re in a space using it. At the end of using that space, jot down some ideas about it, you could do this in a Notes app on your phone, a Google doc you could bring your laptop with you if that’s easier.

Otherwise, if that feels too chaotic, if it feels like you can’t get lunch ready, and then process what it was like to get lunch ready and then move on with your day, then you need to set aside some special time that’s different from your regular daily life on a weekend on an evening after everyone’s going to bed and move around the house from place to place to place visiting the more attentionally and just conjuring up the things that happen during the day during the week on special occasions.

And of course, you can’t conjure the future. But you can imagine it. visiting your house is more about what is and not about what should be. But remember how I said you want to do whether you’re doing it in the moment or you’re doing it in a special visit, you are carrying a document source you are carrying a notebook you are carrying a Notes app, because the most important thing you can do in this exercise, and frankly, in all the workbook exercises I share with you is to write it down.

It’s gonna feel fresh to you in the moment, you’re going to think about this, you’re going to talk to your spouse, you’re gonna feel like oh, we had a good conversation we got on the same page. That of course is helpful to do it at all. But if you don’t write it down, it’s never going to be as clear as it feels in your head writing it down is clarifying, you have to choose the right words, you have to put them on paper or digital pixels.

And it’s also going to be so much easier to come back to refresh your memory later and to share with someone so whatever you’re doing with any of the workbook exercises within the master plan in the month, within your master plan process, remember to write it down or type it down or speak it into a voice recorder, however you choose to catch it, catch it.

I also wanted to say while we’re talking about the subject with visiting the parts of your house, which again is a really important part of the dreaming exercise, this is it’s borderline, it’s crossing over into discovering what’s going on.

But unless interested in this case about the structure of each space in your house and much more interested in how they are being used in your life, how they are working for you, or not working for you how you’re fitting your life into the spaces that you have.

When you are visiting your house. I think at some point I refer to this as a listening tour. That’s a metaphor, obviously. And it’s not just about eye candy about your ears. It can be about what you hear how is the sound separation between one room and another and how does that make Like the room that you’re standing in right now, the best use for what you do in it, but it’s about all of your senses.

It’s a lot about your eyes. Where does clutter accumulate, but it’s also about your feelings. Where do you feel clutter accumulating, because anywhere that things end up at a place, the sort of places where non important non room specific materials just kind of wash up and get stuck and stay for too long get dusty. anyplace you lose things, that’s a sign of a mismatch between your life and your house, there’s not storage for something where it needs to be, or there isn’t a direct path from the place where you use a thing to the place where it goes to the place where you don’t want to have it on you anymore.

This often happens if there isn’t any kind of defined entry area, either at the front door of the house or in some sort of space between outside and the kitchen. And it often means that backpacks, lunchboxes, coats, sunglasses, keys, ended up on kitchen counters and get in the way of cooking and get tucked away somewhere and get lost.

So another thing to listen for is frustration, and disagreement. It’s often true that the places where you have disagreements with between people in your household, if you get annoyed at your kids, if they get annoyed at you if you and your partner have disagreements about timing, someone runs late all the time. Now, you can’t change whether you’re an early person or a late person with a remodel.

I’m not a social engineer, I don’t believe your house is going to solve every problem. But I do believe your house can cause some problems. And we want to remove all of those in our clever, well planned master plan. So think about the places where you’re waiting for someone who’s lost their keys, or you yourself always have to run back for something and someone is waiting on you, or where it’s just hard to get kids focused and ready to get out the door because there’s too many distractions around and the pets crate is also in the same room where the outdoor things are kept.

Sometimes there are practicalities, you need to keep certain things adjacent to each other. That example of pet crate place to get out the door, these things can make sense, it’s often a wash and ready room, if you’ve got a mud space, it’s the access to the backyard is the access to the garage. But thinking about where for your particular family for your lifestyle right now, where things are causing problems is a great jumping off point for how to think about reconfiguring the space.

And there’s only so much we can do to completely change the way your life is working. But all of these things are data, they are opportunities. So if you feed all of this in your head, if you’re generating your ideal home profile and writing it down, so it sticks in your memory, if you’re taking the time to reflect on the places in your past that have been meaningful to you. And what about the space of those places has made a difference to your life. If you think about what’s going on in your house right now, and where it’s rubbing you the wrong way.

You have the raw materials, to solve problems creatively, and to share problems with people when they have an opportunity to problem solve for you. So getting all of this stuff put together is the most important thing you can do right now. And I hope that this is how you were spending week one of your master plan in the month process. Or if you’re doing it faster, a proportionate amount, use about a quarter of your time, if not more, on this dream phase, it is infinitely useful and powerful.

And you can return to it again and again. And again, whether you’re working on just one little room right now, this work that you’re thinking about your bigger house will apply. And if you’re thinking about a bigger space, your whole house, you can come back and ask yourself these questions again, if you ever feel like the answers are fuzzy. All right. So there is a pep talk.

Um, I had one question, Julie, you are here right now. And if you can turn on your audio, you’re welcome to elaborate. But you shared a really clear question that I absolutely wanted to address today. Because it’s honestly it’s perfect timing. It was the perfect question for this week one. They picked your dream issue. And what you said was that I’m too ashamed to go back to my builder and interior designers and tell them to scratch the plan.

They’re ready to quote us this week. I’m thinking I should wait and see what the quote is, then come back with a new plan that I’m working on now. What can I expect from their response? And how best to proceed. So Julie, you are so in good company by having already gotten the ball rolling on a process with people with a team with other people in design with contractors. Sometimes with your spouse or partner.

A lot of people come to the Master Plan process in the middle of their story. Whenever you have time to inject some masterplan. Thinking into your process is the right time at the start is easier and cleaner, but it’s never too late to begin. The answer of how this is going to go over with other people depends on the other people. If they are interested in a really good outcome for you, they’re going to want to know what your new thoughts are at any point.

Now there may be some natural annoyance that if they’ve done worth based on instructions you gave them. And now you want to change the sort of basic philosophy of what’s going on. They may think, Well, what was that time spent for, but I think actually, there’s always something to be salvaged.

Ideally, there’s usually something to be salvaged. And a really good team is going to be more interested in a good outcome than they are in going from point B to point C to point D, as quickly and effectively as possible. This is the time while we’re still talking about quotes, while we’re still talking about designs, it’s never going to be easier to change your mind, you certainly don’t want to let them get into actually getting into demolition, getting into construction, and then realize that there are important things to you that haven’t been addressed in the remodel.

Because although sometimes those things can be addressed them, they’re gonna be way more expensive. So they’re still in the place where they’re giving you a quote, they’re still in the place where they’re putting together, they’re documenting their plan for you. I mean, ideally, this is something they would have known before they did that work. But this is the best possible time to let them know that your thinking has shifted.

So I think actually, if you can just take a deep breath, and feel like the work you’ve done completing the dream phase, congratulations. This is really just setting you up to respond well to what they’ve shown you. So you can look at what they’ve got, some of it may be very aligned with the thinking you’ve been doing. Some of that may have shifted. But having as much clarity to share with them as possible, will be really helpful. And again, they’re going to tell you their quote. You’re going to tell them what you would like to change about the design about the process. And then that’s going to change the quote. It may make it go up honestly, there might be some ways in which it comes down.

But this is the back and forth. I think. As a female socialized person, even as a designer, myself, when I am the client, when I am working with a professional, I always want to make their life go as smoothly as possible and causes little floss as possible, I want to do that so they don’t overcharge me. But I also want to do it so I don’t annoy them. And so that everybody just gets what they want out of life. But the real bottom line is that you’re about to pay them to do work.

And not only should that work be what you want for your sake, but they don’t actually want to do work you don’t like it’s not good for any of their business models, to have their clients come out at the end of a process frustrated and unhappy and sort of silently seething, that’s not going to get them referrals, that’s not going to get them repeat work from you, that’s not going to get your neighbors to hire them.

So if they know what they’re doing, they want you to tell them everything that’s on your mind. So that the end process, what they actually charge you for what they actually do what is done and photographed and goes on to their website actually fills you with joy, you’ll write them an excellent testimonial, yours, tell everyone you know, your friends and neighbors will hear about it from you.

And when they give your name to another future client, you will tell that person that they were a joy to work with, and that when you had a fresh idea in the middle of the process, they listened to you and they turned on a dime. So I’m hoping that they know that and even if they don’t, I’m sure that what you should do for yourself is ask for what you want and need.

And knowing more about yourself. This process should it may have changed the way you’re communicating, it may have changed your list of desires. But it should never be taking you further away from what you actually want. It’s only the dream process can only get you closer to your ultimate goals.

So I know it feels uncomfortable to feel like you’re coming to this this meeting where they’re hoping to they’re hoping a rubber stamp it and you have a sense that what you’ve communicated thus far may not give them enough information to give you back something you can rubber stamp.

But it doesn’t, it’s not a required rubber stamp. It’s not required for you to just look at everything they’ve done and say yes, this is the best possible time while you’re still in design while you’re still getting the quotes put together to change your mind. So go ahead and change your mind if you want to You got my permission.

If you if you’ve got leave to turn your mic on and say anything about it. Now I’d love to hear any follow up questions how you’re feeling about that? If you don’t, we’ll just leave it at that with my encouragement to you and to everyone to ask for what you want.

Even if it means changing your mind even if it means presenting new information to your design team after the fact that’s okay. And I this is also to any of my well it’s unlikely that a master plan client will be watching this video but I will say the same to anyone that I work with. I always want to know if your circumstances have changed.

I want to know if what we’re proposing what our master plan includes is not what you’re looking for. Because it’s not our goal to give you a design that’s just cool but doesn’t suit your life. It’s our design. Our goal to give you a design that perfectly aligns with the life you’re trying to live in your house.

All right, well, that is 30 minutes of very solid pet. I hope that this architect chat has made you feel excited about the process. You’re asking yourself questions, you’re asking your partner questions, you’re thinking about possibilities dream is really where we get to open up. It’s not necessarily what are all the expensive things I would like to attach to my house Wish List moment.

But it is a moment of it’s a life Wish List moment. And it’s a time when you get to say, How could my spaces work better for me? And I should just emphasize that, that does not mean how can my spaces be more expensive. Sometimes the things that we come up with when we realize what’s not working in dream are as simple as just rearranging the furniture coming in and out of a different space.

Della Hansmann 

So having the ability to think flexibly is going to come from asking yourself the right questions, it’s going to come from opening up the possibilities. And you may be able to do some really clever things as we get a little further down the process as we start to brainstorm design solutions. Having the right challenges all listed out for yourself, just makes you more flexible and more able to think quickly and effectively. Okay, I am. Oh, hey, Julie, have we got you? Hi.

Julie L 

Yeah, I got lots. Somehow. Do you hear me? Yes. Okay. Okay, good. I just wanted to interject, thank you so much for responding to my question. Oh, good. It was really obvious that I wasn’t getting along with these people. They the designers were trying to create ideas. They were introducing the dream. And I wasn’t able to get there with them. And every time they would suggest things and show me things, I’d say great. And I’d go home.

And I would say no, I don’t really think this is right. And I think it all came to being because I wasn’t doing that dreaming to begin with for myself. So the lesson here was that if I’m if you’re not getting along with these people, there’s something missing. And it was the dream part for sure. For me,

Della Hansmann 

Well, then hopefully, there’s one more opportunity for this to work out that if you have more of an idea of what you’re coming from and what you’re asking for, they may be able to meet you there. If not, this is a case, I actually didn’t want to go next I didn’t give the most negative scenario, which is sometimes you say what you want, and the person you’re working with, can’t give it to you won’t be able can’t see it.

And that means there’s a mismatch, and I don’t recommend going forward with someone who can’t respond to okay, that you have fully if you My goal with a masterplan process is to make it easier for you, for me when I’m a client for everyone, as a person getting help to get the help we’re looking for.

Because when we can ask our questions really clearly, we know what we’re looking for, for people to give us good suggestions to give us helpful advice rather than just general advice. So fingers crossed. If you can come back to your designer with more confidence, asking for it, they’ll be able to come up with suggestions. And

yes, thank you. Yeah,

That’s such a perfect, okay, that was that’s a really positive, perfect way to end this. I’m gonna leave you all with a note that knowing what you want is the most important thing. And it’s the best way to come up with good ideas themselves.

And it’s the best way to get good feedback from other people, which again, when we’re designing in a hurry, we need a team, we need to get good ideas from other people. And we get those ideas by having really clearly requested situate situations so that they can give us suggestions that are going to make it better and also the way that we wanted worked with.

So I will see you all again this time next week. And for three more weeks. Well, three more weeks, including next week. And then we will continue to be available in all the other mediums, the podcast ready to remodel but for now, focus deeply as deeply as you can on dream.

And once you’ve done your dreaming, jump ahead to the next step because it’s really great. This isn’t going to be asking you to make a scale model of your house in the discovery phase within master planning month but knowing a few key things about your house is gonna set you up again to get the advice you need from the people you’re working with and to have a great experience.

So I’ll see you all next week. And in the meantime, dream away.

Della Hansmann 

That was everything I need you to believe about planning a remodel quickly and well. The most important step to do right at the start. When time is super short. Do not neglect this one. Asking yourself what you specifically what your family actually need to get out of your house project.

Della Hansmann 

Knowing what that is and being able to articulate it will allow you to skip over or shortcut some of the other parts of the design process, because you’ll be able to communicate better with the people that can help you get the work done and make good choices. And it will set you up for the confidence and quick decision making facilities that you need to hit all the question marks that inevitably come up in a fast remodel. If you’d like some help to do that, I’m here for you.

And so as mid Midwest, the most obvious jumping off point to check out would be the master plan and a month mini course which is carefully curated to contain everything you need to do a quick remodel with no extraneous bits. Or maybe you just like to hire mid Midwest, and me to put together a master plan on your behalf.

But I’m still going to ask you to do the design thinking the introspection that we’ve just been talking about in this episode, I can’t come up with this good design solutions for you until I know what the design problems you are experiencing, really are.

So find the transcript of this episode and a link to the resources I mentioned about how to get help at our show notes page midmod-midwest.com/ 1712. By the way, the good news is that this work is not only potentially very easy to do, but fun and helpful in other parts of your life.

It can be good for your efficiency of life, regardless of your house plans. It can help smooth over conflicts between family members. And it can also just make you feel more self-actualized and more in control of your day, your holiday times and the future.

So enjoy that. You may want to enjoy it a little longer than normal. Because next week, we will be taking the week off on the Fourth of July from the podcast. Hopefully there’s something in our back catalogue that you can use to get inspired. Or perhaps you’ll just start doing some of the design thinking that I talked about today.

And we’ll be back in early July with a fun series that I’m super excited to share with you. I’ve been having a series of chats with some of my favorite friends from the mid-century community.

So stay tuned week after next I’ll be sharing two conversations I had with Jim Drzewiecki of ginkgo leaf studio on how to plan the landscaping around a mid-century house. Then I’ll be doing a little series of these conversations with Jim. With Adrian Kenny of mid mod Colorado. With Susan Hala of make it mid-century and more through the rest of July.

So I’m looking forward to that and hopefully you are now looking forward to spending some time over the upcoming holiday downtime. However that may work out in your life to contemplate how you can use your home better to facilitate special occasions like the fourth if it is one for you, or regular daily life. I’ll see you in two weeks.

Pin
Tweet
Share
Pocket
Email