Let’s get the scary part out of the way first. Your mid-century house, the one you love for its charm and quirks, does not comply with the modern building code.
That’s ok for now. No one is going to knock on your door tomorrow demanding you rewire every outlet in the house.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
What is grandfathering?
Your home is currently grandfathered into every code statute written and approved after the day it was built. This status is a free pass for your house to just exist … until you decide it’s time to actually start remodeling.
The moment you start making changes, you’re going to need to bring those parts of your house up to modern code standards. Talking building code is about as sexy as discussing insulation or plumbing, but the building code is our friend.
The concept of a building code goes all the way back to the code of Hammurabi which dates back to the Babylonian culture. And if you’re familiar with the phrase an eye for an eye, that was the justice system that was used in that time. It was applied as a death sentence for a builder whose construction failures killed someone else.
Now we don’t generally execute contractors or architects today, but we still regard building safety as a very important thing. When you go forward in time to around the 1100’s, England’s first building code forbade thatched roofs and added party walls as a requirement in urban areas. The goal was to prevent fire spreading through cities. And in fact, in 1625 the first recorded code in New Amsterdam, now modern New York City, regulated roof coverings as fire prevention.
A lot of the building code concepts I was trained in, a lot of building history deals with fire, fear of fire, and avoiding death by fire. Because at their core, building codes are there for our safety. Updates are often pushed by insurance companies as a way to reduce the potential for financial risk. But at their base, they are for health, life and safety purposes. And we want our designs and our plans for our homes to be as code worthy as possible, not just to comply with the law, but so that no one will die in a fire.
What to know about your local building code
know enough to avoid surprises
When you’re preparing to remodel, you don’t need to become a master electrician or memorize every line of the zoning code in your district.
But becoming a little familiar with the local rules governing what you can and can’t do—things like setback requirements, flood zone concerns, or other restrictions—will help you navigate your remodel with far more ease.
Pay attention to electrical updates
For example, a typical mid-century kitchen might only have one or two outlets, but a modern remodel will require far more, including GFCI-qualified outlets near water.
Get clear on fire safety
You’ll also frequently run into fire safety regulations, such as properly separating your kitchen from your garage. In many mid-century homes, garages were tacked on later and the formerly exterior wall was never upgraded for fire safety.
Know how you get out of every sleeping space
For main floor ranch bedrooms this is not an issue. But if you want to put a bedroom in a basement, you need to plan. The basement stair will be one “means of egress” and then you’ll also need another a window (and excavated window well) with the right dimensions.
Moving the stairs means making them longer
Stairs are another frequent “problem” feature in mid-century homes. Tight stairwells, with teeny tiny landings and crazy dimensions were apparently all the rage in the 50’s.
Fixing a noncompliant stair design is often a matter of creating a longer space of stair and sometimes, depending on the direction of the orientation of the stair to the house, that might mean that there’s not simply enough room. We can’t fit both a landing at the top and bottom of the stair with proper headroom and proper rise and run. It can be very complicated to consider moving a stair!
That doesn’t mean it’s not worth it.
Sometimes it is absolutely THE game changer move to shift the stair.
When we are dealing with a kitchen that is impossibly small, it’s less problematic to move a staircase than to build an addition. And if we know what we’re doing and why, we can find solutions. Sometimes that’s a tiny bump out addition for more landing space or to tie the location and function of a stair in with another design move.
How much or how little building code applies to your house really depends on where you are located, because we only have a theoretical national standard for a building code.
Building codes are actually enforced by local municipal governments, your city, your township, your county. (These are often based of state codes so that’s a great place to start.)
Grandfathering might just be your best friend
Now, there are times when the grandfather status of your house will help you in your remodeling process. I had a project, a pretty dilapidated hunting cabin in a really, really beautiful part of northern Wisconsin on a lake that was built within the shoreline setback.
Now, in most places, there is a regulation saying that you cannot build within a certain distance of water’s edge. This may be for flood safety reasons. It’s also for just sort of “lake beautiful” reasons.
Houses that were built long ago in close proximity to the water have a location that is grandfathered in. This house was built very close to the water line and the new owners loved that. But the local contractor determined – mid project – that there just wasn’t enough of the house to save. (It really was in alarmingly bad shape partly because it had never been on any kind of foundation and had a lot of differential settlement. The racoon residents hadn’t helped either!)
So then the question became, were we going to be permitted to rebuild a house in the same spot, or would we now have to move the house back 75 feet from the water line?
A question like this is always going to come down to the opinions and the preferences of the local officials in charge of administering the building code.
A grandfather given happy ending
But as it happened , because we were able to get survey evidence of the house having been in place in the past they OKed it. They were permitted to build a new mid-century style structure close to the water line within that footprint. And, while it’s not my preference to tear down mid-century houses, this was the best possible outcome for these clients. The new design was a really lovely twist on what had been there originally.
My clients at the lake had hoped to remodel a charming mid-century cabin, but for them the proximity to the water was even more important.
Code challenges often require us to get creative in order to achieve our most important remodeling priorities. These challenges end up moving us toward surprisingly good solutions that we might never have considered.
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Read the Full Episode Transcript
00:00
Your mid-century house does not comply with the modern building code. That’s okay. No one’s going to knock on the door and demand that you have an electrician come over tomorrow to rewire every outlet in the house. Your house is grandfathered into any code statute that was written and approved after it was built. But if you start to make changes, you’re going to need to bring parts of it up to modern code.
00:20
And look, I know this isn’t as sexy as the best mid-century tile sources or how to set up a perfect kitchen remodel, but the building code is our friend. It keeps us safe from fires, from falling ceilings, and makes sure that there is always somewhere to plug in that Vitamix. So today, let’s talk about the modern building code, how it applies to your remodel, and what you need to know a little, not a lot, in order to plan properly for changes to your home.
00:44
Hey there. Welcome back to mid mom remodel. This is the show about updating MCM homes, helping you match a mid-century home to your modern life. I’m your host, della Hansmann, architect and mid-century ranch enthusiast, and you’re listening today to Episode 2216.
00:57
Okay, before we get into this, I want to ask you, do you follow mid mod remodel, or me della, mid mod Midwest, anywhere else across internet? Do you get our emails? If not, I would love to send you a helpful little reminder and some helpful, cheerful advice about the podcast every week. Do you follow us over on Instagram? I’m not there as much these days as I sometimes am, but that’s always the place where you can reach out and get a hold of me directly.
01:23
And do you follow us on YouTube? I’ve been paying a little bit more attention to video content recently, and this is how do I put this to podcast? To me, is a lot like the episode we’re going to be talking about today. It is a library of long form resources, deep information, a lot of side quests, a little rambly. It’s often based on answering questions I’ve gotten from clients, from students inside my ready to remodel program, just trying to make sure that as much useful, comprehensive information about mid-century homes and making good choices for them is available to anyone who wants it as possible.
01:58
So if you’re a longtime listener to the podcast, Hey, I see you. I love you. You’re great. But over on YouTube, I am trying to be a little bit more oriented towards the strategic side of planning to remodel. So if you’re looking for a pep talk, some insight into the remodeling industry and how you can get what you want out of it and not let it push you around, and some guidance towards moving quickly forward into planning a remodel. Meet me over at camera three. I’m kidding, there’s just my iPhone, but meet me over on YouTube, and let’s get into it.
02:28
I’ve just been putting together a new video series that is oriented towards jumping into progress. So over there, we’re going to be talking about how to plan some work you can do on your home in 2026 that might mean a bigger vision of the work you’re going to do now and two years down the line, and then a 10 years down the line dream project. Or it might mean figuring out that what you need to do is fairly surgical. You don’t need to make that many changes, but what you can do and get started on right away, but everything I put over on YouTube over the next couple of weeks is going to be oriented towards getting into action and planning for 2026 changes, improvements to your house, large or small.
03:09
If that sounds useful. I put up the first of the video series on Tuesday. It’s there right now. You can go check it out. And it is all about how to avoid getting stuck, getting demoralized by thinking about the overall cost of everything a remodel could be. in this economy, which so often happens, when people begin by sort of googling cost of an average kitchen remodel and then realizing that they don’t have that kind of available resources, and so they just stop. if this is you, if you feel like remodel plans are too expensive right now, I want to kind of reframe what might be possible.
03:41
And I’m doing that over in that YouTube video, and from there, continuing to just talk about how to sort of plan well within the greater remodeling space, and how to get what you need out of contractors, out of designers, out of me, out of anybody you work with and plan a remodel you can actually take on. So that cheerful, helpful, actionable advice is going to be over on YouTube adding up over the next couple of weeks.
04:03
If you’ve got friends who might like that, if they’re more YouTube people than podcast people, tell them maybe follow the channel. I would really appreciate it, and not to be icky about this our computer overlords. But the more people with a genuine interest in mid-century who happen to follow those videos and interact with them on YouTube, the easier time the YouTube algorithm will have in connecting them to other mid-century homeowners who don’t listen to this podcast and have never heard of Mid Mod Midwest anyway, only go over there if you want to. But I did make these videos with you in mind.
04:33
The second in the series, How to avoid getting stuck in Pinterest overwhelm, a problem that nearly every mid-century homeowner I talked to has is dropping next Tuesday. I will link to the first video in the series in the show notes. But you can also just go to YouTube and look for mid mod Midwest. It’ll be right there. Speaking of which, the show notes for this episode are going to be at midmod-midwest.com/ 2216. Let’s get into our episode.
04:59
So last week, as we were talking about the Sanborn fire insurance maps and the way that knowing even historical facts about your house could be really useful in sort of positioning you to make good choices going forward, I mentioned the concept of grandfathering, that there could be an aspect of your house which was set up under an older or without a version of the building code that is now applicable to it, and that knowing that your house existed before the code was enforced might allow you to choose to make a different, perhaps a less expensive, change to your house.
05:36
So as I started to get into that, I realized there was way more to talk about it than we had time for last week, and I wanted to come back this week on the podcast and discuss in more detail what it means to grandfather in terms of a building but also just to talk about how knowing a little bit about the building code can be relevant to you. Now this isn’t because you are needing to become a master electrician or know all of the ins and outs of the zoning code in your particular district.
06:09
But getting familiar with the local rules governing what you can and can’t do in your home, and with what local authorities will want from you, as far as paperwork and a remodel, knowing the details of What you can do in your home in terms of setback requirements, flood zone concerns or other restrictions is something you can farm out to experts. But the more you know, the more you have even a familiarity with what’s going on, the more you can navigate your remodel process with ease.
06:35
Now, when in doubt, I’m always going to tell you to go call an expert for a quick consult, and in the case of code questions, that’s probably going to mean calling up your local calling up your local building department to confirm or clarify anything. But I really believe that this is useful, because we want, we want to follow the building code. We want to make our houses as safe, as well insulated as accessible as we can.
07:02
And mid-century houses, while lovely in many ways, probably do not measure up strictly to the standard of a new building today. So knowing more about how the building code once was and how it is today will allow you to make informed choices that you can improve things about your home voluntarily, or if you’re doing a large enough scope of work, if you’re doing like a full kitchen remodel, you will be required to bring the full kitchen up to modern safety, electrical, structural codes. So this can also be really helpful in terms of avoiding unpleasant surprises when you start to talk to contractors.
07:31
If you’ve been dreaming and wishing and hoping and thinking only about the esthetics of a house, you’ll be unpleasantly surprised by some of the regulatory concerns that come in, and that’s not the fun part. It’s not picking tile, it’s not solving your layout problems. It’s not any of the sort of beautiful, satisfying, big win things. But we do, we do need to pay attention to what’s going on in the code. So I’m going to tell some stories from my own client work, some when knowing what has been going on in the code and even knowing about grandfathered status has been incredibly useful or allowed us to preempt a problem or to make a decision.
08:14
Once, if we’re going to commit to making a change, knowing that we’re going to trigger coming out of a grandfathered status, then we’re going to make that worthwhile, or not do it at all. But first I just want to give a little bit of I just want to give a little bit of framing for codes and what they are and how they work. So here’s where I’m going to come back to my history nerdiness. Remember these the podcast episode is where I get to go deep. The concept of a building code goes all the way back to the code of Hammurabi. And in order to talk to you about this, I am going all the way back to my notes from my architectural licensing exams, which I’m the kind of learner who I like to read or hear something, and then write it back down again, and then organize those writings into color coded subheadings topics basically make my own little textbook for myself.
09:01
So I found my little study textbook that I’d put together for the construction documents and services exam, one of seven that I took in order to become a licensed architect. And yeah, I actually had some fun going back into this. But the code of Hammurabi dates back to the Babylonian culture, and they if you’re familiar with the phrase An eye for an eye, that was the justice system that was used in that time, and it was applied to a death sentence for a builder whose construction failures killed someone else.
09:31
Now we don’t generally do it that way today, but we still regard building safety as a very important thing when you go forward in time. And by forward in time, I’m still talking about like 1100 and something. England’s first building code was regarding forbidding thatched roofs and adding party walls as a requirement in urban areas to prevent fire spreading through cities. And in fact, in 1625 The first recorded code. Code in New Amsterdam, now modern New York City regulated roof coverings as fire prevention. A lot of the building code concepts I was trained in, a lot of building history deals with fire, fear of fire, and avoiding death by fire.
10:17
And a lot of the building code concepts that I was trained in and tested on, and I have notes about in this, the let’s say, 50 page document I put together of code and professional standards regulations have to do with safety in larger buildings, in urban spaces occupied by many people, offices, multi family, residential spaces, mixed use developments, high rises and they we have Building Code covering things like making sure there are proper fire exits, continuous routes of travel that are sized for the number of people expect to be in the building, how many stories above ground those routes can go, doors designed to be clearly recognizable as a means of egress, set up with panic hardware that always opens outward when someone is trying to get out of a building, areas of refuge where someone who’s not capable of using the stairs can temporarily wait safely for assistance.
11:04
This is yikes kind of stuff, but it’s very important. We have to follow these rules. Now the residential building code is generally less dire, less like, here’s where you can wait and hopefully not die of smoke inhalation while firefighters come try to rescue you. It’s generally oriented around, like, get out this window right here, but it’s no less serious for being smaller in scale. And I’m going to talk a little bit about means of egress, about electrical safety, and a bunch of other codes going further, but I just, I want to underline the fact that we often in a construction process, we often end up talking about codes and inspections and regulations as something that limit us and force us to do things that we might not necessarily want to do.
11:50
But at their core, building codes are there for our safety, and they are often pushed by insurance companies as a as a way to reduce the potential for financial risk, but they are generally at bottom for health, life and safety purposes, and we want our building codes and our designs and our plans for our homes to be as code worthy as possible, not just to comply with the law, but so that no one will die in a fire.
12:17
I should say we often think of barrier free design, the ADA, what we might call accessibility design as code compliance as well. Now, technically, while architects in major public buildings are required to consider the ADA and barrier free design, it’s not an enforceable code, which is a weird little distinction, and typically the I mean the ADA has really nothing to say about residential buildings because it applies the Americans with Disabilities Act, as it was passed in 1992 was primarily concerned with making public spaces available to every member of the public.
12:49
They’re still a good idea, however, and we can take some of the regulations that are applied to public buildings and use like turning radius for a wheelchair in a bathroom and apply that to the design for a bathroom that we anticipate will be used by someone in a wheelchair. So if you’re curious about that, I’ve talked, actually just recently, back in September, in Episode 2206 about designing accessibility into a mid-century home. And that’s a great place to go if you’re looking for ideas for how to make your home either more accessible right now or more future proofed against your own potential needs for barrier free design.
13:24
Again, that actually transitions perfectly into the fact that how much or how little building code there is applying to your house really depends on where you are located, because we don’t have a national Well, we do. We have a national theoretical standard for a building code, but building codes are enforced by local municipal governments, your city, your Township, your county, one of those groups is probably going to be who has designated your building code. Your state will certainly have some state level residential building codes, so that’s often the place to go. Here in Wisconsin, we follow the residential building code set by the Wisconsin legislature.
14:06
But when in doubt, it’s, I mean, you have to comply with the rules that apply to your specific house. But when in doubt, it’s never a bad idea to follow a larger, a broader code, which is generally going to be more restrictive in most cases. So the international residential code covers all building, plumbing, mechanical fuel, gas and electrical requirements for one and two family dwellings, townhouses, that sort of thing. It’s definitely going to cover you. So that’s not a bad place to start.
14:34
And there are other little micro aspects of code that are protecting us that we might not interact with directly, like Underwriters Laboratories, if you’ve ever seen gotten a new lamp and it has a little, usually a silvery sticker on the cord, which says, Ul, something, something, something. This means it was tested to pass a product safety exam to make sure that it’s basically to make sure it’s. Not going to catch on fire when you plug it into the wall. We have code and societies with standards that cover gypsum, as in drywall, concrete, timber construction. There are codes that are governing what’s happening with the two by fours we can get at the hardware store and the lumber yard there.
15:17
Yeah, there are just like, all sorts of little micro codes that you don’t really need to pay attention to but are protecting you and keeping you safe. Questions of your whole house, certainly the arrangement of spaces, the structure and means of egress, which means, how do you get out of the house in an emergency when you can’t walk down a hallway and go out the front door, generally fall under international residential code IRC or a state designated code system.
15:45
California, for example, has a very specific and kind of intense set of codes to address their own standards and regional issues, like earthquakes. Wisconsin, where I live, uses uniform dwelling code, and it’s generally a pretty code light state compared with other states around the US. But then you’ll also get into specific profession, specific codes, the electrical code, the plumbing code. There will be code issues that pertain specifically to fire separations between houses and garages or houses and other houses.
16:15
And then zoning will govern how your house can take up the amount of space that you own as a lot so it will have to do with side setbacks, how much of your total property area you can fill up with house and or garage and outbuildings and whatnot. If you’re going to have an outbuilding where it can be located, how it can be positioned in the rest of the house.
Now, the best way to go find out what codes apply to your house, frankly, is not to do research. It’s to go to your specific municipality, make a phone call, or, even better, make an appointment, or just show up and talk in person to local building code officials. It’s never a bad idea to check in with people before you do anything in your house, particularly if you’re going to be DIY-ing any part of it, and make sure you know what are the overarching building codes in your area and what area what issues the local code authorities expect to come up for projects you’ve got in mind. I find that you know, even in this era of strained government resources, it’s always best to just have a talk in person with someone.
17:17
Now permitting and planning departments are just as busy as everyone else, and so, you know, obviously, read the room. Don’t try to get someone’s attention when they’re doing something else. It might be worth it to call and ask if there is a good time of the day or week to come in and talk to somebody. But it’s easiest to have someone who is actually in the know about your specific area, tell you, point you to the resources, send you the links, because doing your own code research can be pretty demoralizing.
17:45
Doing a little bit of a code overview is part of what we perform as a service for our master plan clients, and we don’t go too far in depth, because a lot of the things, like the number of outlets in specific areas, is beyond the scope of our schematic design process and will be handled by the specific subcontract. Who’s going to take it on? But we do. If we’re thinking about making a small addition, or reconfiguring the space, or moving a stair, I’ll talk about all of these things in our in specific a little bit further down, we want to you know. We want to know that we are proposing designs that are buildable, that are compliant with local codes.
18:18
So we’ve got to do a quick check to find out what zoning district is this house in, what local codes apply to it. If it’s in Wisconsin, I generally do that pretty much off the top of my head, although we always do a double check to make sure I’m correct. But in other states and other places, we’ll do a quick zoning review to make sure we’re catching all the local rules. And it is consistently confusing. This is part of the reason we do it for our clients. Somewhat hilariously, I just ran into trouble with this yesterday.
18:50
Back in the day when I was a solo designer doing entire Master Plan packages and process myself, it was always on me to do this code review. Now that I have a small team, it’s the first pass of this is something I have my design assistant perform. But we had our one on one yesterday, and she just couldn’t figure out how to figure out what the zoning designation for a particular house was, and so she just asked if I would, you know, show her what she was missing. This house is located here in Madison, Wisconsin, my hometown, and it ought to have been the easiest thing in the world for me to pop up a zoning map and show her the relative information.
19:23
And instead, she watched me flail around on Google for like several minutes as I went down rabbit holes and found the wrong websites that didn’t contain the information we were looking for. Eventually, I realized I’d done a master plan package for a house in a nearby neighborhood several years ago, we went and looked up the information that my records on that project, found out the types of zoning designations that can exist. Sometimes it’s going to be r1 r2 meaning residential, residential, commercial, something like that. In this case, it was trc one, traditional residential compliance one, I think consistent, consistent one doesn’t really matter, but I was able to figure out what are the categories based on what this other house was, and then Google for those specific categories, and then find a static map that contained the proper information, and we could just lock it down and move on.
20:17
But my point is that even I don’t do this every day because we don’t have a new project every day, but I do this regularly, and it’s still sometimes hard for me and my team, who does this fairly often, still sometimes gets lost. We know how to track it down in the end, but don’t feel bad if you’re having a hard time figuring out the legalese of code language or how even to find out the relative information for your house, you can just go ask, ask for an expert opinion, as long as you have some sense of what kinds of code issues are likely to come up in your remodel plans, large or small, you can focus down on the particulars.
20:57
You can check with the professionals you’re going to engage to do the work and trust them, they will be accountable to their professional licenses to make sure that they’ve crossed their i’s and dotted their T’s and gotten it all right, but as long as you have a sense of what kind of things are going to come up, you’re going to feel more confident knowing how to proceed forward and what kinds of tasks and costs are going to be associated with bringing your house in compliance with modern code.
21:21
Again, most mid-century houses are grandfathered, which means, you know, okay, let’s talk about the electrical code. For example, most mid-century houses do not meet modern electrical standards. If nothing in your house has ever been updated, if you have a time capsule house, it’s pretty much guaranteed to be non-compliant. Now, that does not mean you have to rush around tearing out walls to add electrical outlets where they aren’t or to update electrical outlets from ungrounded to grounded. That’s two prong to three prong if you are just trying to jam a plug into the wall.
21:54
But if you start to make changes around the house, any room that you change significantly will need to be brought up to meet modern code. If you change a lot about your house, you may be asked to go ahead and bring the entire or big areas of the house up to code. Just remodeling a kitchen, for example, isn’t likely to trigger a full update of your entire house. And for example, any room you do nothing in, any bedroom you don’t touch, you probably don’t need to add outlets to. But you might want to. You might choose to bring all of the outlets from ungrounded to grounded standard, for example, so that you can plug in a power strip or a computer or any number of useful things.
22:37
There are, of course, little converters that you can get that you just stick a two prong thing into the wall and it has a hole for three prongs, and that 3/3 prong in your computer outlet is just has somewhere to go. But that’s not exactly the same thing as having a grounded outlet. And ideally, if you’re plugging in something as valuable to you as your computer, you would actually like it to be properly grounded as it goes again, something you might want to just get addressed for your own sake.
23:07
In a mid-century house, you’re unlikely to have water appropriate outlets near bathroom sinks or kitchen sinks in the way that you’re modernly currently required to do, and it’s not a bad idea, so bringing all of the outlets in your kitchen up to 20 amp G CFI, or ground circuit fault interrupted, that basically means that the outlet is very sensitive to any flow of electricity between two conductors, and it will trip or turn itself off if there’s a problem that’s easy to reset. There’s a little button that you can push in the middle. There’s often a red light with it, and this safety feature is meant to prevent you from electrocuting yourself, which is handy because in a kitchen, we’re more likely to have wet hands there.
23:48
Similarly, in a bathroom, any outlet that’s within a certain distance of a faucet is required to be G, C, F, I qualified. Now you’re going to need a lot of outlets in a kitchen remodel your original mid-century kitchen. A typical mid-century kitchen probably has an outlet where the fridge was supposed to go, an outlet near the stove and maybe one along the counter for your toaster. A modern kitchen needs one GCF I outlet every four feet along every counter surface. Another way to explain this is that at any point on the counter, you should be no more than two feet from an outlet. So a section of wall wider than 12 inches needs an outlet. This can feel overwhelming from a layout point of view, but it’s really it’s a good idea if you’re looking for places to plug in your microwave, your mixer, your Vitamix, your coffee maker, oh yeah, and charge the tablet displaying the recipe.
24:39
This also means you need a lot more circuits than a mid-century house has you need a separate circuit for your lights versus the outlets, the dishwasher, the garbage disposal, the microwave and the electric range all need their own circuits. Basically, a new kitchen takes up a lot of space in your breaker box, which may mean that now you need to update your breaker box. You might need. To go from a 100 100 amp to a 200 amp service. This, none of this is something you really need to be specifically familiar with but just be aware that it’s going to be one of the associated costs of a kitchen remodel, and that ultimately, even though it feels expensive, it is both much safer and an improvement to your cooking experience.
25:19
Code around plumbing issues is probably going to be even less top of mind for you, although, of course, it’s important and should be followed in your residential remodel process, you might run into an overall number of bathrooms or number of usually it’s number of toilets that are required per number of bedrooms in house, if you’re making on if you’re adding on space, if you’re making extra spaces that could be considered as bedrooms, that might come up and then what’s probably the question you’re going to get asked most specifically related to plumbing code in a remodel is, if you’re replacing a dishwasher, or if you’re putting a sink into an island, you might have some issues of garbage disposal or an air gap or high loop separation for the dishwasher drainage.
26:03
These things are relatively minor, but again, there are codes governing this, and they will come up during the course of the remodel.
26:13
Other things that will come up like if you’re sticking inside your existing footprint, you’re not interested in zoning and you’re not interested in fire separation, necessarily, although many mid-century houses that I encounter are fire safety non-compliant in the connection between the house and the garage.
26:30
That’s because there originally wasn’t a garage and the garage was either added on before there was any kind of fire code applied, or it just wasn’t properly inspected. But if you have glass in the door between your kitchen and garage if you can peek out through your kitchen door and see your car that is not a fire rated door, and you certainly will need to be corrected if you know if you do any work in the house that is likely to become inspected at any point.
26:55
Also, it’s not a bad idea to make sure that your kitchen is properly separated from your garage in terms of fire safety, the odds of a car exploding in your garage are very low, but never zero, and that is the reason for fire safety regulations and fire separation between houses and garage. This, yeah, this. I see this again and again.
27:17
Actually, in many mid-century houses, there is a charming top light, half-light door from the kitchen that once went out to a side yard or went out to the backyard, and then a garage was added after the house was built, and they left the original door in place. And even though that might be giving you a little bit of daylight, it’s not a good idea so often, in a case like that, it also means that there’s not proper fire separation in the wall, and you need a thicker layer of dry wall applied to the usually the outside the garage side of the wall to create a good fire rating and a fire rated solid door.
27:49
If you are making changes to the footprint of your house or adding on spaces in general, you definitely need to know about your zoning designation your property lines and the setbacks that you are allowed to or that you’re not allowed to build within between the edge of your property and the edge of the buildable area. This is relatively straightforward to figure out in theory, although it’s the thing that I was just describing, it took me an extra like two to five minutes of googling to try to figure out the relevant information for a recent client project.
28:26
But in theory, you start with a property lookup of your address with a local assessor’s website. This will tell you when your house was built, your zoning district, maybe, and what the assessor knows about your square footage and building materials. You’ll also see the records of sale going back several years from there, you can google your local zoning code and track down the relevant information about setbacks, height and area restrictions for your zoning district.
28:50
And then you can also figure out what building code governs your jurisdiction, find an online copy of the code. But as I’ve said, it’s going to be really dry and really obscure. Sometimes the easiest way to get all of this information, plus find out what the city already knows about your home is just to ask them, and that’s also a wonderful time.
29:07
I don’t want to promise this at all, but when you go down to your local municipal office, you may find that they have records on hand, even floor plan information about your house, or certainly perhaps any records of any permitted remodeling work that’s been done in the past. So this is a good opportunity to just learn a little bit more about your house and the building code.
29:29
If Google can take you to your zoning district and any information about it, you’re good to go. If not, there is no shame in phoning a friend on this one or phoning a local official. Now, in some cases, this historical information or the setback information is going to be more relevant than others. If you have a house that’s already relatively large on its lot, and yet you need a few crucial feet of added space in order to make some circulation issue go you want to know down to the silly millimeter, how much space you’ve got to push out.
30:00
Or this can sometimes be really important in terms of grandfathering, I had a project that came up on our master plan docket about a year ago, I want to say, a pretty dilapidated hunting cabin in a really, really beautiful part of northern Wisconsin on a lake that was built within the shoreline setback.
30:21
Now, in most places, there is a regulation saying that you cannot build within a certain distance of water’s edge. This is for flood reasons. It’s also for just sort of Lake beautiful reasons. In Wisconsin, the shoreline setback is 75 feet from the water’s edge. But again, grandfathering houses that were built long ago in close proximity to the water can stay. So this house was built very close to the water line, and not in a way that’s likely to have this doesn’t have major waterway issues. The water is not going to rise. This isn’t necessarily a flood zone issue at all. It’s just a matter of It’s a quiet Lake, and they don’t want new construction right up against the water.
31:02
So the question was, Is this house going to be permitted to be remodeled? Which was our original plan in that spot? Yes, certainly we’re allowed to remodel the house on its existing within its existing structure, to whatever extent is necessary. But working with the local contractor up on the site, it was pretty quickly determined that the house had suffered some major deterioration over the years and also might never have been sort of set up properly on a foundation.
31:32
They were hoping to raise the house and put a footing underneath it. And in the end, they realized that they needed to demolish the house and start from scratch. So then the question became, were we going to be permitted to rebuild a house in the same spot, or would we now have to move the house back 75 feet from the water line? This is one of those places where it’s going to come down to the opinions and the preferences of the local officials in charge of administering the building code. But as it happened in this case, because we were able to find survey evidence of the house having been in place in the past, we were permitted to rebuild a new mid-century style structure, not my preference.
32:11
We went into the design process with the understanding that we were going to be remodeling from what was there, but we ended up proposing a new build design, and that was able to be on the exact footprint of the previous house. Nothing could go outside that footprint, not a deck, not a patio, not an overhang, but we were able to stick with that existing footprint and create a lovely, modest, mid-century size house in the footprint of the original della bladed cabin, right on the water’s edge, so homeowners desires met, and a really nice outcome from kind of a sticky situation, all because we were able to prove that the house was properly grandfathered in place.
32:51
Now this sort of question also comes up in areas where there has been disaster damage, if we can’t rebuild exactly what was there. If we can’t remodel the house, as it stands, we may have to completely comply with new building and zoning codes. Now this comes into an important issue because of down zoning.
33:13
It’s often true that what was permitted, the amount of floor area, the location of houses in one area, particularly in urban space at one time have now been down zoned so that what could have been multifamily dwelling can now only be a single family. What could have been several stories in height can now be several less stories in height. And so for a town dweller, it might mean that your house is too close to its property boundaries. For someone who is in a shoreline setback, that might mean you need to move your house back for someone who is in a FEMA designated flood zone, that might mean you need to elevate your house onto stilts, onto a platform to get up above flood water designations, and it can create a lot of chaos.
33:51
So most of these are outlier situations, not what your average mid-century home is going to require, but one case that’s going to come up again and again and again for you when we’re thinking about the potential for improving a mid-century house, is that often a mid-century era Ranch House has a stair in an inconvenient location for the layout. And the question that often comes up in our master plan packages is, is it worth it to consider moving that stair?
34:19
Often the answer to that question is no, because stairs in mid-century, houses are often grandfathered. The modern requirements for a stair rise and run, the tread, height and depth, essentially and headroom at the bottom of the stair are going to be slightly more generous than the way that the stair was built, which means that it’s not a matter. Let’s just be clear, it is never a matter of sliding a stair over three feet. Is a matter of demolishing a stair, patching the hole that it went in, cutting new structural lines supporting the floor around it in a new way, and building a new stair in a new location. But it’s not even a matter of one to one, taking a stair in a particular footprint and moving it to a similar location, 10 feet on the other side of a room to make better flow.
35:03
It’s often a matter of creating a longer space of stair and sometimes depending on the direction of the orientation of the stair to the house, that might mean that there’s not enough room anyway, to have a landing at the top and bottom of the stair with proper headroom and proper rise and run. So it can be very complicated to consider moving a stair. That doesn’t mean it’s not necessarily worth it to do that. Sometimes it is absolutely the game changer move to shift the stair.
35:33
When we are dealing with a kitchen that is impossibly small, it’s less problematic to move a staircase than to add on an entirely new room or expand the footprint of the house. And if we know what we’re doing and why, we can find solutions that let us create a tiny bump out addition for more landing space or tie the location and new function of a stair in with another design move.
35:57
Maybe one of my favorite things to do on a house that has an elevation change in the in the backyard, particularly if we’re trying to create really comfortable downstairs living space and make it more connected to the house is, rather than having a straight closed stair that runs between main floor and basement level, do a split level stair, maybe with a half level small addition off the backyard that creates a den that reaches out towards the backyard and really connects the spaces across so that there’s open flow, kind of creating an almost a split level effect with a small addition that hits halfway between two floors.
36:33
Knowing that we’re going to go that big is sometimes justified by the fact that we have decided we quote, unquote, have to move the stair, and we know we can’t just slide it over, as it were. We’re not going to get away with that in code. So we’re kind of, once we decide to go to that length, we are authorized to go big and make a big move and really transform the entire way that the house lives.
36:56
So I don’t know, for me, I think of these things, these regulations are ultimately always to our benefit, and they do allow us to make some really dramatic improvements or sometimes require us to think about the house in a very different way, rather than tweaking. Sometimes codes push us off into a transformation style remodel.
37:17
What else is going to go up with stairs? Oh, you know that? I think there’s another element of stairs, stairs that fall under the Safety Code. You need to have stairs of a certain regularity with space, so that there’s room for someone to get out of a house an emergency and in a house, in a mid-century house with a basement, typically, if the basement is currently unfinished, it’s never been considered living space, and it’s not considered sleeping space, but putting in a guest bedroom or even a teenager’s bedroom downstairs is a great way to expand the living area of a house without expanding your footprint.
37:52
However, you may not allow someone to sleep in a basement with only one means of egress. That’s not safe. If there were, God forbid, a fire and the stair access got blocked, that person will be trapped downstairs, and that would be horrifying. So you need two means of egress from any basement bedroom. One of them is going up the stairs and out of the house through main floor exits, and one of them is going to be some other way. It might be a walkout basement door, or it might be a window of a certain dimension in the basement wall, and I am a huge fan of putting in window well, windows into basements, not only for fire safety, but also to bring daylight into the space, to make them feel more like main level living area.
38:32
One of the brightest rooms in my house is the basement bedroom that currently is an exercise space for me, but has an egress rated window well, with not just the little plastic insert, sort of half circle, minimum viable legal escape realm, but a nice railroad tie timber retaining wall that my dad and I put together that has planter boxes in it and is pretty to look at, and creates a little view sitting at the desk in front of that window looking up at looking up at the sky.
39:03
So because we’re required by code, to put in a basement window that allows someone to escape from a bedroom in the night, if necessary, we’re also required to make basement bedrooms bright, cheerful, livable, wonderful spaces. So it turns into a big twofer, and I’m always happy to recommend them to any client that’s looking to add bedroom space in the basement or sometimes as a project.
39:26
We’ve got on our boards right now. It’s a really tight house they’re using technically; their dining room is the third bedroom. It still has bedroom doors on two sides, one that opens to the kitchen and basement stairwell and back door, and one that opens into the bedroom hallway towards the bathroom and the other two bedrooms. But they’re thinking seriously about removing those doors or reorienting them, opening them completely, so that the space can feel more like a dining room and more like the social living space of the house.
39:53
They don’t want to go from being a three bedroom house to a two bedroom house, because someday they feel like that’s going to be an issue down the line. Do. But they’re perfectly happy to think about this house having three bedrooms, one of which is in the basement, and that, I think is a perfectly reasonable, I wouldn’t even call it a sacrifice, a perfectly reasonable decision to make. They are a child free household where they sleep in one bedroom, would like to have a guest room for someone else, and that’s basically it, and a home office.
40:17
And there are a lot of other people who are looking to buy houses like that now and deeply in the future. So if someone needs bedrooms for six kids, they will buy a different kind of house than this particular house, and that’s just okay.
40:31
So hopefully you’re feeling a little bit more conversant with the concept of building codes and what kind of code issues might come up in a remodel, you’ll certainly be required and you will want to improve the number and location and type of your outlets. You might improve the entire electrical wiring system of your house.
40:48
I didn’t even talk about insulation, actually, but anytime you’re doing work on the exterior walls of your house, it’s a great opportunity to bring a mid-century house up to modern insulation code, no. Basically no. Mid-century house meets modern codes in terms of insulation, because, as we’ve discussed on the podcast many times in the past, we just didn’t have as high a standard of comfort back in the day as we have today.
41:11
And so if you’re going to be keeping your house cool in the summer and warm in the winter to modern standards of comfort, it’s nice to be doing that with as little leakage of air as possible. But in general, all of the building code things that we’ve discussed today are there to save your life or make your life more convenient. They are good things, and sometimes, knowing that we’re forced to take a bigger step towards code compliance, as we un grandfather our mid-century houses can mean that we get to make really beneficial decisions, like making a staircase access to the basement that creates a better connection between social living spaces in your house.
41:47
Sometimes that means opening up a view through a cross, replacing a wall with some posts or slats. Or sometimes it means moving a stair to another part of the house or dividing a straight stair into two runs so that there’s a half level in between them. we’re even looking for a little bit of extra storage space that can become office space or living space in an attic that has a particularly on mid-century high roof.
42:10
The possibilities are many, but whenever we’re thinking about code issues, those challenges can turn into creative impulses that move us towards good solutions that ultimately make our lives better. That’s at least how I always think about them when I am thinking am thinking about a mid-century Master Plan approach to improving on a mid-century house.
42:28
I will have references to some of these things. I don’t know, maybe the code of Hammurabi, where you can go looking for some modern, handy code references. And certainly references to, oh, I’m going to link to the new YouTube video all over on the show notes page. You’re going to find that at midmod-midwest.com/ 2216.
42:49
And I will see you next week for a brief introduction to the live Q and A from this fall’s mid-century master planning master class. I think you’re going to find that if you’ve got questions about how to make good choices for your house, somebody else might have asked them at that live event, and I wanted to make sure that we got this onto the podcast at some point. It’s going to happen next week.
43:10
But for the moment, if you’re looking for more enthusiasm, more good advice, and frankly, specifically some impulse, impetus to get moving towards changes you can make in your house, large or maybe quite small in 2026 I want you to head over to YouTube Mid Mod Midwest, no spaces, no dashes. Over on YouTube is the spot where I’m going to be putting up a five part video series on how to break down the barriers to Remodeling in 2026 and get yourself ready to go to make some changes in your house. You can actually start and start enjoying right away. I’ll see you over there.