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Sanity Saving Strategy to Finish a Remodel Strong

32 min readFinish a remodel strong with thoughtful final choices, course corrects when you need them, and mindset resets to help you bring your cats home…or whatever personal remodel milestone will help YOU stay positive and avoid remodel regret later on.

Are you mid-remodel right now, or maybe you’re just starting to think about one? Whether you’re already living among the dust and chaos or you’re just dreaming about your future project, it’s critical to focus on how you’ll finish your remodel strong.

This week we’re diving into the importance of your remodel mindset as you approach the final phase, making those last choices that will impact how you feel about your home for years to come.

Keep the (real) end in sight

When you’re deep into a remodel, it’s easy to lose sight of the finish line. Delays happen, choices pile up, and it can feel like your project will never end. But I want to remind you that the final choices you make—those last few tweaks and upgrades—are going to be the ones you live with every day. This is where it’s important to take a deep breath and make decisions that you’ll be happy with long-term.

I recently watched this play out in real time with my sister, who’s currently remodeling her kitchen and main bathroom. She’s been living through the dust and disruption for months, and it’s been both rewarding and challenging. When she hit a rough patch, feeling overwhelmed by delays and missing her cats (who were sent to “summer camp” at our parents’ house during construction), she had a choice to make. Rush the project to get it over with or slow down, regroup, and finish strong?

Be ready to maintain your quality level at the end

One of the most important things I learned from watching my sister’s remodel was how valuable it is to stretch just a little at the end. I’m not suggesting you blow your budget, but if you’re faced with the choice between an upgrade you know will make your life better and saving a few bucks, it’s often worth the splurge.

For example, my sister had to reorder her appliances mid-project. At first, she was tempted to settle for a lower-end dishwasher just to stay on budget. But after a little reflection, she decided to go for the model she really wanted. It was only about $100 more, but it will make her daily routine so much easier—and she’s thrilled with her decision. That’s the kind of choice that can make or break your satisfaction with a remodel in the long run.

Finish strong, mentally

Remodels can be mentally exhausting, and it’s crucial to protect your mental health as you near the finish line. For my sister, that meant reevaluating her decision to keep her beloved cats away during construction. Once she realized the most chaotic parts of the project were over, she brought the cats home—and it made all the difference in her ability to stay calm and focused on finishing the project well.

Sometimes, finishing strong means taking a break. Whether it’s getting out of the house for the weekend, indulging in a treat, or simply giving yourself permission to slow down, it’s essential to find a way to recharge. You want to look back on your remodel with pride, not exhaustion or regret.

Plan ahead from the start, to end a remodel well

If you’re still in the planning stages, you have the opportunity to set yourself up for success. One of the best ways to ensure you’ll finish strong is to budget for those final upgrades from the beginning. Plan to leave a little wiggle room for the last-minute decisions that will make your remodel feel truly complete—whether that’s a better appliance, custom cushions for your new kitchen bench, or simply a few thoughtful details that make the space feel polished.

And if you’re mid-remodel and feeling the pressure?

Take a step back.

Check in with yourself and your household. What do you need right now to keep going? It might be time to slow down and bring home your metaphorical cats—whatever that means for you.

Think of the lifetime of your home

At the end of the day, your remodel is an investment in your future comfort and happiness. So, when you hit those last few decisions, don’t cut corners just to get the project over with. Stretch for the upgrades that will make a difference to you. When you’re sitting in your newly remodeled kitchen or lounging in your mid-century living room, you’ll be glad you did.

In Today’s Episode You’ll Hear:

  • How to finish your remodel and bring your cats home. 
  • Why late stage choices and changes can be a good thing for your remodel.
  • Where to find the inner resources you need to get through the final stages of your remodel. 

Quick Design tip for your … Kitchen

Make sure to include a space to settle in and hang out in the kitchen.

When you’ve got a gorgeous updated kitchen … you’ll want to spend a lot of time in there. So consider: bar stools, a built in bench, an eat in area or even a stand alone reading chair!

You’ll know what’s the right layout for your social dynamic.

More details on kitchen hang out spots … right here!

kitchen update essentials free guide

Mid Mod House Feature of the Week

The wall oven

Sure, the baseline, the budget friendly mid-century food cooking unit was a push-in, freestanding range. But the dream version, the high end version in the mid-century era, was a wall oven, and the really good version was a wall oven set into a wall of brick, sometimes enclosed in decorative brick, but often built into a real, solid masonry wall.

Check out my pinterest board of great mid mod features right here!

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Resources to help you finsh strong

Listen Now On 

Apple | Google |  Spotify

Resources 

And you can always…

Read the Full Episode Transcript

Della Hansmann 

So are you actually mid remodel right now? That is the moment that some people find this podcast, and even if you’re not, if your plans are still a year or more out, what I’ve got for you today is going to be really helpful. If you are in the middle of a storm of drywall dust or living among boxes in a rental waiting to get back into your home.

Della Hansmann 

I want to talk to you about something urgent your mindset right now, the choices you’re making or about to make will significantly affect how you feel about everything that’s already happened and how you will feel about your home for years to come. So let’s talk about how to weigh those last few choices that come up in a remodel, the final finish picks the answers to complexities that arise mid project, the choice to extend the project to get an unexpected, great result, or cut it off in order to get it over with.

Della Hansmann 

Have you been pacing yourself for a strong finish? I’m going to frame this episode as how to finish your remodel strong, and that’s a good metaphor, not only because I just finished my first 10k race. 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.

Della Hansmann 

I’m your host, Della Hansmann, architect and mid-century ranch enthusiast. You’re listening to Episode 1901 so Yes, welcome back to the mid mod remodel podcast. I guess I’m really welcoming myself back. You’ve been here all along, all summer, having a summer full of mastermind chats with some of my favorite people in the mid-century space.

Della Hansmann 

If you missed any of them, go back and grab them. Nothing I say is ever really time sensitive. This isn’t a news podcast. We’re talking about the mid-century. So most of the design and qualities of the buildings that I’m talking about are older than I am by several decades, but we’re talking about how to make them relevant to our lives today, to the culture, to the places we live later.

Della Hansmann 

In this season, I’m going to be talking about a trend I’m seeing right now about modifying houses to include better office space. This is really relevant in the world of people converting parts of their house that used to be necessary extra bedrooms or living space or guest space, space for more children are now spaces for not just one but multiple adult home offices. People are converting their garage bays into living space so they can have more office space in their house, because they need less cars to drive and more house space to be a good office. But in general, the things that we talk about on the mid modern model podcast are not time sensitive things. Let’s see.

Della Hansmann 

Before I get into this, I want to highlight a few things coming up this season. I’m going to do a couple of new bits. The first one is to talk about some classic features of the mid-century era, house things like color block, bathroom tiles, sliding glass doors built in, appliances, the breakfast bar, great stuff, some of which was invented in the mid-century era.

Della Hansmann 

Some of it was just popularized in that time, some of which may still exist in your house today, and if it does not, for some of these features, you might remember them from last year’s mid mod madness, that I did a March Madness STYLE tournament, that I threw up on Instagram. I’ll be asking you, can you fit this feature into your house? Do you maybe want to?

Della Hansmann 

So I’ll wrap up every episode with one of those fun features, and I’ll start every new episode in the spirit of easy to follow advice, quick action. You can take resources you can dive into ASAP. I’ll give a little tip about smart choices for a mid-century remodel, not necessarily things you need to take on an entire remodel to do, but things you can take on in a weekend project your level one changes.

Della Hansmann 

Some I’m going to take care of it this fall. I need some inspiration. What will it be? So I’ll do a couple of little tweaks. So keep your ears open for those two new features. Speaking of being an alert listener, several of you already noticed that last week was the inception of my new podcast mic. Can you hear it? Just for argument’s sake, Here’s a snippet of what the podcast used to sound like before I started using the podcast mic.

Della Hansmann 

I have been making mid mod remodel for five years now and recording it all on my iPhone because I’m a minimalist at heart and I don’t like new things. I think we can all agree that this is a leveling up. I’m perfectly willing to admit that, and it will come up later in this episode, that sometimes it’s incredibly worth it to spend a little bit of money to get a much better result in the long term, I am an object lesson for myself. Yay. So from there, let’s move on to our episode tip.

Della Hansmann 

Let’s talk about one of the key elements of a truly customized mid-century kitchen. One of my favorite design elements to include is a space to settle in and hang out in the kitchen, because you want to hangout spots in the kitchen, done right are going to be the place you want to spend more than any other room in your house.

Della Hansmann 

And I’m not just talking about bar stools at a bar counter, although, yes, that is a great place where you can pull up at least two bar stools, and if you do it right, make sure that there’s really room for your knees there and to tuck the stools away. And not be in the flow of traffic when they are not in use.

Della Hansmann 

A good bar stool arrangement leaves you room to lounge comfortably without having to either hunch over or pull yourself into a sitting splits in order to get close enough to the adjacent horizontal surface. But I encourage you to go further. Think about eat in kitchen spaces. It might just be a little extra area with a freestanding table and chairs or a lovely built in nook, find a corner for a bench or even an armchair in the kitchen.

Della Hansmann 

So think about this. Beyond the bar stool, an eat in table is a mid-century classic. It’s nice to have a spot for two stools at a counter, but you could also consider just an open area where there’s room for a table and chairs as a bonus. This could be on top of dining space elsewhere in the house, or it might be where your family sits to eat every meal. You’ll know what’s the right layout for your social dynamic.

Della Hansmann 

To take that idea a little farther, one of my favorite things is to put an L shaped seating nook into the kitchen. So this is a combination of bench and table chairs set up when you’ve got a full house, some people are sitting at chairs at the table, but other people are sitting on the other side of the table, on the bench. And if you’ve only got a few people in the kitchen, someone can lounge along comfortable, well-padded seating. Put their feet up.

Della Hansmann 

This might be folks hanging out with the cook, or it might be the cook themselves taking a break in their own kitchen. It becomes an ideal spot for work from home, for homework or just for spreading out to do a bigger project. Or think about putting an armchair in your kitchen, yes, or a window seat, a built in bench someplace that doesn’t have a table associated it’s just a place to sit and be comfortable. This can be again, for someone to hang out with the cook while the cook is working.

Della Hansmann 

Or can be a place for the cook to sit and wait for water to boil, or an oven timer to go off when your kitchen is wonderful, freshly remodeled, perfectly curated, restored to what it once was, you’ll want to spend a lot of time there when it’s well-lit and well designed and well finished. It’s a place where you want to be. So why not make a comfortable spot to hang out right inside your kitchen?

Della Hansmann 

So ask yourself, Do I have a pleasant place to hang out in or inside of my kitchen. If not, why not? To get more on this or the other four key elements of a mid-mod kitchen update that’s perfect for your home. Grab them in the mid mod kitchen update essentials guide I made just for you. Get It At mid mod midwest.com/kitchen.

Della Hansmann 

Find complete show notes with resources, links, images and a transcript of the whole episode on my website at mid mod midwest.com/ 1901.

Della Hansmann 

All right, so today we’re talking about how to finish your remodel strong both what you might want to do now, if you’re at the beginning of a project, to set yourself up for success at the end, or if you’re there, if you’re in it, if you’re in the middle of everything, how to gather the mental state that you need to make great choices all the way through until the end.

Della Hansmann 

Now everything feels more relevant with a real world example, and I’ve got the perfect way to make the idea of finishing strong, of wrapping up your remodel well for you today real. My baby sister is remodeling her kitchen and main bathroom right now, and she’s really been in it for the last few months. It’s been both glorious and stressful, as most remodels are. And of course, I’ve seen clients and students, friends and strangers go through this process many times before, but I’ll probably never have more complete insight into the emotional state, into the mind of a homeowner than right now when it’s my sister.

Della Hansmann 

She’s able to whine, to brag, to worry, to wonder at me completely freely as a design professional, it’s been really fun for me to watch and of course, offer a little advice and also extract some advice that I will now share with you. So here’s the short version of the two most important things to hang on to when you are at the end, the almost end of a remodel. The first one is, have saved a little money or be willing to spend a little money right at the end of the project, both on last minute upgrades or options and on the little details that help you finish out a project well.

Della Hansmann 

And the second one is, find the way that you’re going to hang on to your sanity. Let’s call this how to bring home your cats. Now you might not have cats, that’s okay. This is a metaphor that I will explain in greater detail, but basically the second one is to basically figure out how you’re going to protect your sense of stability, your mental health, your patience to the end of the project. It might be as dramatic as needing to plan a spontaneous Airbnb escape. Do you need to just get away from it all? Or as simple as taking a deep breath. Laugh at yourself when you start to spiral into a ridiculous a ridiculous panic that they will literally never be done with your project.

Della Hansmann 

They will, and also it will take longer than you think, find what you personally need and what your household needs in order to keep going strong all the way to the end, so that first one save a little money to spend on upgrades, on options, on last details, right at the end. Here’s the example I want to dig a little deeper on for classic remodeling snafu reasons, my sister recently had to cancel the order for her appliances, which were coming from a big box store, and instead get them from a local base distributor.

Della Hansmann 

She should have probably done that earlier. But in any case, you don’t always make every choice in a remodel, and that doesn’t mean that the remodel will go wrong. You just course correct. So she was catching me up on the state of her remodel one afternoon, and she explained that when she placed the reorder, she looked at all the possibilities again, and she remembered that she had originally been trying to squeeze her budget by opting for a lower end dishwasher that didn’t have a feature she really did want the model she had compromised on at the big box store wasn’t available at the new store, and when she thought about it for a moment more, she leveled up to the one she had really wanted all along.

Della Hansmann 

It was only about another $100 and in the grand scheme of things, she knew she’d really rather have that easy wash feature than save $100 on a remodel that will cost much more than that in the overall so why am I telling you this? When she told me this story, I started jumping up and down. I was so happy for her, not because of the dishwasher. Now, I don’t really care. I personally don’t have a dishwasher. If I waited to fill up a whole dishwasher with my neatly stacked Corningware bowls, I would run out of spoons way before I had a load.

Della Hansmann 

But I was very excited for her, because this means she has paced herself correctly in her remodel. She’s closing in on the last choices right now and still feeling able to think about the big picture, the future, how she will use the house on a daily basis, what will really matter to her, to her husband, and what won’t. And she’s not cutting corners on the job to get it over with or to save a few bucks. In fact, it’s going to slow the process down slightly to make this substitution, but it will be so much better.

Della Hansmann 

So this really gets to the question of when to make an upgrade decision, when you need to make a knee jerk decision, when you have to respond to something quickly in the moment, like this dishwasher substitution, no matter how you go through your remodel plan, even with a mid-century master plan, some things will have to be decided on the fly, and whether you make that a good thing or a bad thing to the overall remodel depends on the direction that you go.

Della Hansmann 

When you talk to people who have remodeling regrets about their house, the things that linger the most are some of the final choices people make, and it’s often about a cost saving move that felt right to them at the time, because the whole remodel was adding up, and it all felt so expensive and overwhelming, and they just wanted to get done. And then, in retrospect, it feels like a missed opportunity. So when you encounter these moments yourself, try to have the sense of future forwardness so that you can take advantage of the opportunity to upgrade to the dishwasher you really want use the sunk cost fallacy to your advantage.

Della Hansmann 

The sunk cost fallacy is that money you’ve already spent doesn’t really exist, or that once you’ve already spent a certain amount of money on something, or energy or time. It doesn’t really matter what you’re spending something that is a value to you. You might as well keep going, because you’ve already put so much of your energy into it. But that doesn’t ever really acknowledge the sense of okay, but if in the in the big picture, is this going to get the result I want? Is this really the right direction? Am I going to end up throwing twice as much money after what I’ve already paid, etc, etc, but when you’re getting yourself into that last moment, sometimes you can look at the sunk cost fallacy as your friend and say, okay, yeah, I’ve spent all the money I’m gonna spend on the kitchen.

Della Hansmann 

That money doesn’t really exist in my head anymore, but now it’s just another $100 for the dishwasher I really want now I’m not saying I want you to just splurge on everything. This philosophy needs to be followed responsibly. You are the best person to determine what is the scale of an expense you can stretch for at this point, another $100 for a better dishwasher. Probably doesn’t feel like a big deal to anyone who’s planning a remodel, but you’re gonna answer this question best in proportion to the scale of the project you’re taking on. I don’t intend for you to take an audio clip out of this episode and try to use it to persuade your more cautious spouse that I told you to go ahead and buy that beautiful tile you’re in love with. It does not matter what it costs.

Della Hansmann 

Now, the point that I’m making is I want to give you a permission structure to filter all of your choices, not just by their relative dollar value, but by how they will affect your life in the house once it’s all complete, when everything is said and done, when the dust has settled, the contractors are out of the house and the last bills have been paid, what’s a good result? This is a good place to mention that I’m not only talking about a cost in dollars.

Della Hansmann 

Remember, some cost fallacy might be about your energy or your time, so sometimes the cost is not just the price tag, but to slow the project down, you might come to a place where you realize there’s a shortcut to be taken that will get the teams, the crew, out of your house two weeks earlier, if you leave something off of your list, or if you refuse the opportunity to make a last minute, clever design change you’ve just realized as possible, but it would mean that you’ve got to pause the project for a month and then they’re going to come back in and pick it up again.

Della Hansmann 

Now I have so much sympathy for the wanting to be done with a remodel process, wanting it over, especially if you’re living in a house while the work gets done. You want the chaos to end. If you’re living somewhere else, you want to get out of your short term lease and get back into the house you already own. I get it. I. The necessity of wrapping things up or paying a little less might feel like the most important thing. This is also a part and parcel with having a little bit of extra wiggle room in your head and in your literal line item budget to spend on these things, it doesn’t have to just me a matter of, I’m going to stretch, I’m going to spend money I didn’t plan to spend on this.

Della Hansmann 

If you are listening to this episode early in your process, looking forward to your end product, you want to be budgeting your time, your energy and your money to have a little extra left over at the end, separate from the necessary overage, the over flow cost that most remodels and to ha end up having, you want to have a little bit of money set aside for the End Times, and that isn’t just for things like upgrading a dishwasher.

Della Hansmann 

It’s also for all the little non construction costs that do turn into requirements for the House to feel completed and polished.

So this might be in addition to having money for the sink that you wanted, the beautiful sink that you chose, that you picked out of a catalog to also go and get the kitchen store appliances, the new drainer that’s going to hold the dishes in that sink, a couple of new towels, if you’ve got a new custom built in bench in your kitchen, custom cushions, or, you know, Brand X cushions that are in a fun color that’s going to pop, that’s going to make it all go, the organizer to go under the sink, the new trash container that’s going to fit into the kitchen, all of those details that you want to live with, to have the whole thing feel polished and perfect and happy.

Della Hansmann 

You want to have planned ahead for that, and you want to let yourself calmly spend that without feeling like it’s chaos without feeling like you just are at the end of your rope and the end of your wallet and you can’t handle any of it. So a lot of this is planning ahead, and some of it is mental state, because you may be just getting to the end of the process and feeling like you cannot even this leads directly into the second point, which is how to figure out what you’re going to need.

Della Hansmann 

You might be able to predict it. You might also have to check yourself in real time to find out what you need to feel, what you need to do in order to have the feeling you want to end the project strong. And again, I’m going to pick on my sister’s project, because I can, I can pick at her a little bit, and she knows I love her, and she knows I think she’s making great choices in her remodel.

Della Hansmann 

She was recently able to save herself a lot of frustration and release some open mindedness to give herself the ability to make longer term choices by reevaluating a major decision in her remodel.

Now, since they are only and I use that term in scare quotes, remodeling their kitchen and their upstairs bathroom right now, she and her husband had decided they could easily live in the house during construction.

They already have an egress compliant basement bedroom, along with their cozy den and efficient, finished bathroom down there, so they decided they would just move into the basement while construction was going on. And of course, it’s been tedious.

Della Hansmann 

They’ve been separated from the daylight, and my sister has to cross the construction zone to get into her office when she’s working from home. But the biggest sacrifice they made to their lifestyle was that they didn’t have their two beloved cats on the premises.

They had decided that they were afraid their cats would be stressed out, and also they might be getting into dangerous substances during construction.

They’d be underfoot for the contractors they might try to escape out the door, plus their two cats are both somewhat shy, since one of them came to them in the pandemic and doesn’t like strangers, so off the kitties went for an extended summer camp vacation at my parents’ house, and my sister and her husband lived without them during the weeks and visited them as much as they could on the weekends.

Della Hansmann 

So when the project inevitably began to drag out a little longer than expected, and it was starting to come to a place of, well, we could make things go shorter if we cut X, Y or Z. She was tempted. She was really starting to lose her sense of calm about the project. And she just felt like every time there was a small delay, even a one day delay, it meant Another week, another weekend of sad, cat-less living. They hit a place in their remodel where a few unexpected snags were going to hang things up for longer than she thought.

Della Hansmann 

It took her moment to even sort of wrap her head around how much longer it was going to take, at which point she started to really have a meltdown over oh my god. How long would it be until she could bring the cats home? And then she reevaluated. She took a deep breath she had come to Jesus talk with her project manager about what all still needed to be done and what was most important to her to process, to get a few loose ends tied up right away. But there actually wasn’t that much more of a real reason to banish the cats from that point forward, only a few work people were going to be coming to the house. They wouldn’t be coming back for a couple of weeks, and they would be taking a pause on the project.

Della Hansmann 

So she realized that she just had in her head The cats were going to be away for the whole remodel. But that wasn’t actually necessary. The real reason. And the cats had been gone was already accomplished, so they waited another three days for those loose ends to be tied up, a few last things to be done, and then they went and got their cats so sure. Now they’re still living in a construction zone, but their patience has completely refreshed itself, because now they can see how close to the conclusion they are. And instead of feeling like, oh my god, we’re not done. They suddenly feel like, Oh, we’re almost done.

Della Hansmann 

So plus, they’re sitting on their kitchen bench. They’ve put in the cushions. They’re sitting there with the cats enjoying it. Like, yeah, sure, there’s a few cell things missing. The microwave is not installed, but there are pieces of the kitchen they can actually work on. And between one visit of contractors and another they can use the space and then tidy themselves back out of it, the wait for those last few items that’s going to make a really big difference to the project. Now no longer feels like a burden, because they have the most important things to themselves.

Della Hansmann 

So I guess this is an object lesson in communication during the course of the construction project, she specifically thought about what’s going on in her needs and then reevaluate what was going on in their construction in their particular case, some turnover in personnel on the crew, some people having family emergencies and having to step back from their project management had meant that they lost their direct line to a person who had always been updating them on what was going on and why.

Della Hansmann 

So they really also lost their sense of awareness of the status of the project, which really contributed to their sense of meltdown and instability in the project. So this is all about how they communicated to get what they want, to find out what they needed to know, and then to make the decisions for themselves about how to feel good about the process carrying on a little longer, because it will. I promise that during any remodel, no matter how small, whether you’re doing it yourself or having it completely done for you, you will start to feel like the project is a perpetual motion machine that will never be complete. But I also promise that that’s not true.

Della Hansmann 

So given those two facts, when you hit the point in the remodel where things start to run behind schedule, you start to feel like, Oh, I’ve bitten off more than I can chew. I can’t escape from this situation. Maybe we should just sell the house in mid construction and walk away into the sunset. When you start to feel that way, it’s time to reset. It’s time to take yourself out for an evening of wine or a morning of coffee, go away for the weekend, or just sit down and rest your eyes on distance outside for a while, because construction is temporary, and living with the choices you make is hopefully forever.

Della Hansmann 

These choices are going to last a long time. So this is a place where, when there’s a panic in the middle of a project, a freak out that requires you to stop and cut quality or drop a key part of the project, that might be the thing you look back on as your major remodeling regret. I’m thinking back to an episode we did this summer where I chatted with Susan Halla of make it mid-century, about the idea that while we own our homes, of course, a mid-century home, or any older home that’s really well built. We own it, but we hope not to be the last owners. We don’t want it to be burned around us like a Viking ship, so it’s going to belong to someone else after us.

Della Hansmann 

There’s a way in which we can think of ourselves as not just the possessors of our house, but the curators of our house. We want to pass this on to the next generation, our kids, the next owners, strong, well designed in a timeless way that doesn’t need to be updated to the next trend, and is built well enough with sturdy, long, lasting choices that are going to go on for decades. That requires us, when we remodel, to make high quality choices, to make good choices for you, and choices that are made of good materials that are going to last as long as they possibly can.

Della Hansmann 

When you are the steward of your own home, the householder of your house, the person who lives in your home every day and will for years, your forever home every weekend, morning, every Sunday evening, you’re going to be in this house touching the services you’ve chosen, using the appliances you picked, moving through the spaces you laid out what are going to be the things that matter most to you.

Della Hansmann 

This is where, if you’re in the middle right now, if you’re making these choices this week, this year, sometimes you’ve planned ahead for it, and sometimes you’re going to require yourself to just bite the bullet, take a few extra weeks of construction to make a great thing happen, or pay a little bit more upfront for a leveled up feature that you know you’ll really value. And I do want you to be aware of that squeeze at the end, feeling even in my own personal circle of experience, I think of the example of my mother, the house that she and my father built 15 years ago. And granted, it’s gorgeous, they’re delighted with it.

Della Hansmann 

I designed that house, and yes, I helped them make great choices. But the one thing that when she reflects on the process of choosing and constructing the house, she always comes back to is that she wishes she had sprung for custom window exterior material, so the whole house outside would have been plaster color and the barn red they chose for their gutters, their downspout their door. Instead, they chose a dark brown standard color for their window surrounds. It would have been just a little more polished if it was the same barn red across all of those outside metals.

Della Hansmann 

Now, does it ruin her day when she looks at the house? No, of course, it doesn’t. But she does think about that often, many times a week a year, when she drives up to the house, she does think about it. Now for another person, with other preferences, with other fixations, that kind of detail might make no difference whatsoever. So I’m not telling you what exactly is the most important thing to spend on, but it’s important to know yourself and to think about a choice, not just for what it costs specifically, but for how much it matters for you.

Della Hansmann 

If you are a fanatical amateur baker, you’re going to want to get yourself an extremely well-reviewed oven, one that is beautiful to you and works smoothly. If you’re a little bit like Carrie on Sex in the City and you’re tempted to show your store your shoes in your oven, because you literally never use it well, you might still want it to be pretty, but you certainly don’t need a top of the line appliance.

Della Hansmann 

There isn’t a list of correct things to splurge on at the last minute. It’s not a universal right or wrong answer. But what does matter most to you will continue to matter to you. So what? Well, what matters to you and to your spouse or partner, the two of you should get each some wins out of a situation, because how you end up feeling about all the money you spend on the project will probably be determined by whether you feel generally satisfied with those final choices, and that will help you feel like all of the money was well spent, or you spent all this money and still didn’t get what you really wanted. What a shame.

Della Hansmann 

Okay, I’m rambling a little bit. But if you are in the final stages of your remodel right now, I am advising you to stretch just a little, to stretch that relative sense of what your budget was for the project, to gather in those last few things and make at least one choice that’s going to cause you to smile every day for the next 10 years, rather than just turn your eyes away and try not to think about it for the next 30 if you’re listening to this episode today, imagining what it will be like when you get to construction.

Della Hansmann 

But actually you’re nowhere near that spot. Then you’re in great luck, because you’re still in the planning phase.

And the exciting news is that you have the ability now to prepare yourself to make those final choices way back at the start of the project, one of the ways that my sister described her success with those final upgrades and with feeling like she’s got a complete freedom to go to the kitchen store and get the sync organizer and the under sync storage and every those little details she needs is that she budgeted for that.

Specifically. She called that a YNAB win. And if you’re not familiar with YNAB, short for you need a budget, y, N, A, B, I have done an episode on this. Let me look up what it is. Episode 909 is, Can I start planning before I have a home remodel budget saved up?

Della Hansmann 

Absolutely you can, because the concept of a budget should be matched one to one with what you want. So this takes us right back to the Master Plan method, when you think about your house holistically, when you plan your whole remodel from the start by asking yourself questions, getting on the same page with your partner, setting your priorities and yes, my expert mid mod remodel listeners out there, I am talking about the dream phase of a master plan. I’m also talking about the last step.

Della Hansmann 

Dream and develop are really going to be the two key elements, because in that last develop step of the master plan process, when you’re applying it to one specific product purchase, that means quickly asking yourself, what matters to me? What are the needs of my house? What materials should this product be made of? How does it relate to the rest of the choices in the house. Am I exploring all of my options for price points and labor, and then am I choosing what’s going to matter the most to me, to fit in with my budget, with my overall choices, with what are my priorities?

Della Hansmann 

That last step is key to having the freedom to make smart choices at the end of the project, because on a bigger project scale, if we apply the master plan not to one specific purchase, but to the entire project.

When you’ve properly prioritized, you are putting the most of your energy, your budget, into the parts of the house that matter the most to you, and that gives you a little wiggle room.

At the end, you’re going to plan with that budget wiggle involved, so that you can stretch upwards for a few really important elements to be added to the list at the last moment, rather than overshooting the mark at the start, taking on more areas of the house to remodel, or a more comprehensive project than you can realistically carry right now.

Della Hansmann 

Budget wise, energy wise, time wise, which inevitably results in one of those three unfortunate situations where you overspend by necessity, where you cut the project off, or where you just pause in the middle and have to sort of set everything down and walk away from it. So to recap, there are two really important things to think about in order to finish a remodel strong.

Della Hansmann 

The first one is just know that whether you say. For it, or you’re just making a decision right now not to cut yourself short on those last few key decisions. Think about the things you should upgrade, maintain quality on work a little longer for in order to have a really good result in the final the lifestyle after part of your remodel.

Make those choices at the end. And you can do that by figuring out as you start to spin, as you start to melt down in the it’s taking forever phase of the remodel, bringing home your cats, metaphorically, finding the thing that’s going to make you feel like, Oh, it’s okay. It’s all fine. I can keep going. I have a little more in me. It’s going to be all right, because you have reset your mental state in whatever key way is really important to you.

So if you can upgrade your dishwasher and bring home your cats, you will have won the race of your remodeled you will have finished strong at your maximum pace. I will be so proud of you.

And what’s much more important is you will be so satisfied with the result of your overall remodel process all of the time, effort and money you’ve put into it from the beginning of the beginning of the planning phase to the end of the last

Della Hansmann 

spot check, walk through punch list, meeting with the contractor, you will be delighted with the process from start to finish, if you can finish with those two pieces in mind. Fantastic. Okay, let’s wrap up the episode with a mid-century house feature that I want to celebrate today. The mid-century house feature that feels super appropriate to talk about today is the wall oven while I’m thinking about my sister’s kitchen, because she’s got one. So now, not every mid-century house has a wall oven.

Della Hansmann 

The baseline, the budget friendly builder basic food cooking unit was a push-in, freestanding range, an appliance that just slides into your kitchen between one piece of counter and another, or at the end of a round of counters.

But the dream version, the high end version in the mid-century era, was a wall oven, and the really good version was a wall oven set into a wall of brick, sometimes enclosed in decorative brick, but often built into a real, solid masonry wall. And in the most logical of houses like this, it’s the kitchen backing up to the living room.

So there’s a masonry hearth in the living room side that’s extended to be a big material accent of brick or decorative stone, and then the same decorative wall backs up into the kitchen, and there’s a bit of that same material showing in the kitchen, and the oven is set into it.

Della Hansmann 

Why is that? Well, a couple of reasons. One, it’s not a bad idea to enclose an oven in brick. Brick is a good insulator, which helps maintain the heat in the unit and prevent it from quickly escaping out into the rest of the house. It’s a safety feature.

It’s fire safe, keeping it all snug in a nonflammable container, rather than a wooden cabinet, although not really a necessary one. Modern wall ovens are not going to catch wood surrounds on fire.

But it also just feels right. It conjures that sense of psychological solidity, hearth in the kitchen in a way that really feels settled. It can, on the flip side, cause a problem for modern homeowners, in that most of the wall ovens that were set into brick in the mid-century era were smaller than the appliances that are typically on the market today.

Della Hansmann 

They’re 24 or 26 inches wide, slightly too small in their outer dimension to be easily replaced with a plug in modern unit. Now the good news is that if you actually still happen to have your original mid-century oven set into a brick wall in your kitchen, the odds are that it still works. Remember, this was an age of appliances before planned obsolescence.

People expected to buy things that would last them a lifetime, and mostly that’s what they were sold. So your mid-century original oven, if you’ve got one, doesn’t come with convection settings, cleaning or a digital readout, but it might still work great if you’ve got one, I don’t know. Think about keeping it if you don’t. If I’m planning a new oven into it in a kitchen Reno, I would not build it into a brick surround if there was never one before.

Della Hansmann 

For one, brick is real. Brick is heavy. You need to put some sort of structural support under it in the basement. And if you’ve got other things going on in the basement that not might not be appropriate, but I do love to talk about a wall mounted oven.

And we’ve talked about ergonomics in kitchens in the past. It’s, let’s say, I hope, obviously better to reach in and grab heavy, hot things when you only need to tilt your head a little bit to reach your arms forward, rather than to bend over at the waist and manipulate hot, heavy trays a foot off the ground.

Della Hansmann 

Modern ovens are pretty well insulated, so I’m more likely to set one right into a wall of built ins, next to a refrigerator or next to a run of full height, floor to ceiling, built in pantry goods, rather than to pick up the actual concept of a bricked in mid-century wall oven.

But if you are in luck, if you do have the good fortune to have a modern brick surrounded mid-century wall oven, I’d love to hear from you, do you still have it? Does it still. Work if you had to pull it out and replace it, what did you put in its space? I’ve had a lot of people use that space for bookshelf, cookbook, storage, display, some mixing bowls. Or did you fill it in? Did you cover it over? Did you remove it? I’d love to know.

Della Hansmann 

There you have it, the mid-century bricks around a wall oven, one of my personal favorite features to find in a mid-century kitchen, even though sometimes it causes a few design challenges to work around, I hope you’re feeling a little better prepared to make the choices either right now, if you’re mid remodel that are going to help you finish strong, or to just think about how to set yourself up for success.

Della Hansmann 

And I always believe that if wherever you’re starting, even if you’re in the middle of a remodel, taking a pause and using some master plan thinking to ask yourself, what matters to you, what’s going on in the house, what you want it to look like, what you could do, and then choose the right choice, the path forward, what you will do. That’s Master Plan thinking you can do it five minutes from the end of your remodel and make one last good choice that way, or you can start that way from the beginning, and you can use the calmness, the forward thinking, the big picture perspective of Master Plan thinking, to walk yourself through the entire remodel with good results.

Della Hansmann 

And I will just say my sister’s project that I chose to talk about today is a is an absolute result of Master Plan thinking. I’ve been slowly incepting her with this since the very beginning and constantly offering her advice about her house that is couched in, okay, what do you need? What do you and your husband want to focus on? What’s going on in the house right now?

This is a fact about the house. Really, this is a necessity about the house. This is an exist. Is an existing material in the house. Here’s your style. Let’s remind yourself what’s important to you. And then one, two and three. Here are options you consider, prioritize it for yourself. That kind of thinking gets you to the last few steps of a remodel that’s coming together really well, but by the way, does not protect you from still having a little bit of a meltdown before you realize you need to bring home your cats. Bring home your cats.

Della Hansmann 

That’s not the title of the episode because it would make sense to no one, but it’s really the theme of the episode at any given moment, frankly, even if you’re just in the early stages of remodeling and to start to stress you out, or the early stages of planning, and it’s starting to stress you out, find the thing that’s going to calm you back down again. The thing I hope is going to calm you down, really, though, is your master plan. And if you want more advice on how to pull together a great master plan, I will just tease that we’re doing a live how to plan a remodel that fits your life and budget masterclass again, just in a couple of weeks.

Della Hansmann 

And if you want to get signed up for that. You can always do that by going to the show notes page, which is mid mod midwest.com/ 1901, or go directly to mid mod midwest.com/masterclass and sign yourself up for that live class. I will see you there, and next week, I’ll see you back on the podcast to talk to you about my personal remodeling regrets and how you can avoid them. I’m going to do a little tell all and share some of my personal shame that I’ve never put here on the podcast before.

Della Hansmann 

So you might find that very interesting. I’m finding it a little stressful to think about recording it, but I look forward to your feedback, and I’m assuming, based on everything I’ve ever heard from everyone in the past, that you’re going to find some common ground with me in how you think about projects you’ve taken on the past, or what you fear you might do when you take on a remodel.

Della Hansmann 

But I think you can learn from my mistakes, that’s why I’m going to share them with you. So see you next week for the personal remodeling regrets of an architect one Della Hansmann, and more importantly, how you can avoid making the same mistakes I’m looking forward to sharing that.