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Yes, You Can Use the Holidays to Plan Your Remodel!

27 min readUse the holidays to focus your remodel plans.

I want you to use your holiday prep time to plan your remodel. 

Okay, Before you tell me, Della, that’s crazy. I can’t plan a remodel right now. The holidays are when I’m busiest.

You’re right. Of course you can’t. You know me. I wouldn’t ask you to make your life harder when it’s already full. But … what if I told you that you could also use this time to focus your remodel planning and make real progress without spending time picking out tile or making phone calls?

Instead, make your future life easier by harnessing all of the satisfactions (and frustrations) that are part of the celebratory times in your house.

The holidays are a great time to dream about what would make next year’s gatherings and visits more delightful. You see your home with fresh eyes when preparing to host. (And you have guests who bring a new perspective and may be willing to share ideas.) You can channel holiday energy and creativity to dream up amazing plans for next year!

Holidays are a stress test for your home’s layout and functionality. This episode walks you through how to capture that chaos and turn it into inspiration. Here’s how to turn the hustle and bustle of the holidays into a launchpad for your dream mid-century home.

Pay attention to:

  • Pinch Points: Are your kitchen, dining, or living spaces handling the crowd, or are they too cramped?
  • Hosting Flow: Where do people naturally gather? Are there bottlenecks or awkward spaces?
  • Functional Fixes: What simple changes, like adding seating or rearranging furniture, could improve hosting?

One of my clients recently discovered the magic of hosting as a planning tool. After a weekend of family gatherings, they realized their kitchen needed not just a bigger island but a cozy built-in spot for casual conversations and homework sessions. Hosting made their priorities crystal clear, which streamlined their entire design process.

As you gather with friends and family this holiday season, take note of what works and what doesn’t in your space. Hosting can be the perfect lens to assess your home’s potential. Ready to plan your remodel? Head to the show notes for resources, including discounts on my Mid Mod Design Clinics. Let’s turn holiday hustle into remodeling inspiration!

In Today’s Episode You’ll Hear:

  • Why the holidays are a perfect time to put some thought into what your ideal home would feel like.
  • My two pronged system for capturing holiday energy that you can infuse into future remodel planning.
  • How to involve your guests in your planning on the sly. 

Quick Design tip for your…addition

If you’re hosting this holiday season and feeling like your home is bursting at the seams, you might be tempted to add more space. But before committing to an addition, ask yourself a few key questions:

  • Are you fully utilizing your current spaces?
  • Could a basement, breezeway, or garage become livable square footage with a little creativity?
  • Is there unused or underutilized space that could meet your needs?

Mid-century homes were designed for adaptability. Start small—sometimes even a micro-addition (like extending your kitchen by two feet) can make a big impact without overhauling your home. 

Here’s my Pre-Addition Checklist to help you plan:

Mid Mod House Feature of the Week

The  Sunken Living Room

Ah, the iconic sunken living room—a feature that mid-century enthusiasts either love or can’t wait to fill in. Born in the mid-century era and made famous by Eero Saarinen’s designs, sunken living rooms (or conversation pits) add drama and style to a home.

But they’re not without challenges—tripping hazards and accessibility issues top the list. Still, if you’re dreaming of creating that cozy, intimate vibe, consider incorporating this feature in a clever way, like a step-down addition that connects your home to the backyard. Whether you love or loathe them, sunken living rooms are a timeless nod to mid-century design.

Listen Now On 

Apple | Google |  Spotify | Stitcher

Resources 

wrapped gift Resources for a Merry Mid-Century Holiday

And you can always…

Read the Full Episode Transcript

Della Hansmann 

Sometimes the best moment to notice what needs fixing around your home can be when you have the least time to sit down and address those needs. If you’re listening to this episode on the Thursday, it goes live, you might be elbow deep in food prep, panicked cleaning your home, or stuck in traffic on your way somewhere else.

Della Hansmann 

Happy Thanksgiving, it is a time for traditions, and that’s why I am reissuing the traditional Thanksgiving mid mod remodel episode on how to use the energy, the chaos, the craziness of holiday time to improve your future remodeling plans, adding in a few fresh elements.

Della Hansmann 

A story about how clients used hosting to help them be even more decisive of their master plan. A house tip on how to plan for an addition, if that’s what you’re screaming for right now. And a mid-century house feature, it’s sunken living rooms this week.

Della Hansmann 

Hey there. Welcome back to mid mod remodel. This is the show about updating MCM homes, helping you match a mid-century home to your modern life. I’m your host. Della Hansmann, architect and mid-century ranch enthusiast. You’re listening to Episode 1908.

Della Hansmann 

Before we get into our design philosophy on how to use holidays to improve larger home improvement plans, I’m going to tap into the unavoidable commercial chaos that comes right after Thanksgiving. Who am I kidding? Black Friday has started long ago, and we’ve all been getting emails with shouty caps, text of ads and discounts and sales for the last month, but I want to encourage you to handle the sales season on your own terms.

Della Hansmann 

I’m not opposed to taking up a big box store and their super sale discounts. And by the way, if you have already master planned your home update, this season can be a great time to stock up on the materials or appliances you’re not ready to use yet, but you know you’ll need in the future, clever you if you’re already in that position. But if you’re trying to avoid succumbing to the endless refrain of buy your holiday gifts for your friends, family and self this weekend, then I would love to redirect you to supporting a small business, maybe a mid-century oriented small business.

Della Hansmann 

I’ve highlighted a bunch of them on my blog, and you can find that support small business mid-century list at mid mod midwest.com/ 1007, any day of the year. But certainly right now, you might find some good discounts or deals on my own account. I really want to encourage you to give yourself and your house the gift of design this year, and that’s why from now until the end of Cyber Monday, I have marked down all of our mid mod, remodel educational products.

Della Hansmann 

Grab any or all of the mid-century design clinics for 50% off. Upgrading your kitchen, your owner suite, your outdoor spaces, the porches, patios and decks, planning a small addition, which I’ll talk about more in a moment. Upgrading your whole house for curb appeal and the more than a mood board clinic are all half off. You don’t have to use a discount code or anything. I’ve just taken the price down temporarily.

Della Hansmann 

The same is true for our master plan in a month program, and I have our flagship program ready to remodel marked down by 25% because I really want you to get started today. You can show up for our next Live Office Hours. Call with your questions, get them all answered. We are going to be doing, actually, a special an extra special call this next, first Monday of the month in December, it will be our layout Buster Challenge workshop.

Della Hansmann 

So ready to remodel students are going to be bringing in floor plans of their house to the group, and I will be putting them in my tablet and redlining them in real time, putting in options, suggestions, brainstorming ways that they can improve their plans. You could get in on that action if you want to join us. So I know you’re busy. The holidays are crazy. I’m about to do an episode about how the holidays are too crazy to plan, but I would love for you to get involved in making good choices for your home.

Della Hansmann 

And this discount is going to be the next opportunity to save money between now and next June, when I do our annual birthday sale, give the gift of good design to yourself or to someone you love. Give it to your house. You can do that by heading over to the website, mid mod midwest.com.

Della Hansmann 

For our mid mod design tip of the week. Let’s talk about planning for an addition. This might be top of mind for you right now if you’re just absolutely pressing the walls of your house trying to make it just a little bigger to host everyone that you need to sit down as many people for Thanksgiving or to sleep as many people as going to be staying over.

Della Hansmann 

Here’s the great news about an addition on your mid-century house. Your home was built to be easily added onto all mid-century houses were they were meant to be the minimum viable house, and you would just add on extra space as you needed it. But remember, bigger doesn’t always mean better.

Della Hansmann 

What you want to do before planning an addition is run through a checklist of what are the necessary pieces of information to have. Do you need it? What are the code requirements? What are the structural existences of your house? So let’s start by step one of designing an addition is confirming that you really need to add on before committing to expanding your house. I want you to think about, is there anything you can do to repurpose the other spaces in your home?

Della Hansmann 

Take stock of what you have already, how you are or are not, using the house to its best possibility. You might well need an addition, or you might need to rearrange the square footage you have, or both. It might be that you want to add on a space and push some existing function into that space. Then do something else with your existing footprint, repurposing and improving on existing spaces your house.

Della Hansmann 

Like your basement, for example, can provide simple extra square footage without the need for a costly addition, and you might have other lightly enclosed spaces, like a three season room or a covered porch. If you can convert a breezeway into finished space, that’s a simpler, less expensive project compared to a full blown addition. So look for the space you need in unconditioned areas around your house, like a basement crawl space, perhaps, or the space between your house and garage where you don’t need to build a new roof or foundation.

Della Hansmann 

If you do decide an addition is necessary, start with the smallest one that meets your needs. Sometimes a micro addition, just pushing out a kitchen by two feet can have a big impact on your home’s functionality and esthetics. So ask yourself, How am I using the space I have? Have I explored all my other options, basement, connected roof spaces, interior or indoor, outdoor porches?

Della Hansmann 

And are there parts of your home that you’re currently using for just storing stuff or for activities that you don’t do that often that could be repurposed for daily life? Like extra storage space and basement that could become a den. Or could you clear out some of your garage and make more space for a workout space out there, then convert workout space inside the house to living space?

Della Hansmann 

I’m not going to talk you out of an addition. I love designing them. But I want you to make sure that an addition is what you really need before you move forward. So grab my free pre edition checklist, which I put together with all the questions you want to ask yourself, the things you want to know about yourself and your house before you plan an addition at mid mod midwest.com/editions get all the resources I’m mentioning today from that additions checklist to the list of mid-century stories you might want to support two links to the discounted mid mod design clinics right now at the show notes page. That’s midmod-midwest.com/ 1908.

Della Hansmann 

All right, today’s main topic is an oldie but a goodie, how to use the experience of hosting or visiting during the holidays, and even just the feeling of being alone in your home with your family during the holiday season to catalyze good choices for future remodel plans that you will make whenever everything is settled down and you have more free time.

Della Hansmann 

Now I want to tell a story before I get into the traditional the best of episode, I want to tell the story of a recent workshop meeting I just had with a lovely couple on my master plan roster. Their home is very cool, built in the Milwaukee suburbs for a newspaper man of the mid-century era. It was designed with a dark room in the basement and plenty of space to host what must have been really killer parties for the entire newsroom on the main floor.

Della Hansmann 

The house has a lot of fine features. Bottom line, it has an owner’s suite already, a small bathroom sure, room for both of the couple to set up their pleasant work from home office spaces and lots of extra room for their adorable kiddo to run around. The house had a few built in flaws, however, and it was remodeled in the 1990s well, but not to their taste.

Della Hansmann 

It had a number of odd era inappropriate finishes, replacement light fixtures that just don’t work, and a bunch of mid-century charm was removed, like the brick feature wall around the fireplace was just plastered right over and a built in planter in the living room was removed.

Della Hansmann 

So with this master plan, our goal was to brush off the surfaces, restore a little mid-century original charm, and particularly to focus on the kitchen, making it more open, connecting it to the mudroom entry, and just generally, creating a better space for family and friends to hang out during mealtimes.

Della Hansmann 

So why am I telling you this story today? Well, as I say, we just had our workshop meeting, which is part of the master plan process where I share our mid-century solutions package, that is the series of design suggestions that my team and I have made, showing multiple floor plan layouts matched with perspective sketch views of how those options pop up into three dimensions.

Della Hansmann 

We get into solutions for shelving, storage, seating, wall finishes, light fixtures and more that correlate to the layouts that I’m preparing. This workshop meeting went so smoothly in part because these clients are design oriented, decisive people who just wanted to see some examples realize so they could gravitate to the right ones, and they knew what they liked when they saw it.

Della Hansmann 

But also because they had just had some of their first hosting in the new house and experienced the way that it did or did not right now accommodate the natural flow of the way they and their guests lived in the house. They had over another couple with kids, and together they ate a lovely meal in the dining room as a double family. But then after dinner, sure enough, the kids went to play in the relatively open plan living room, and all of the adults ended up in the kitchen, hanging around while the dishes were done. Even though this kitchen, if anything, the 90s remodel made it smaller and less social host capable than its original floor plan.

Della Hansmann 

People just like to hang out in the kitchen. This knowledge made it so easy for them to read the three plan options I had shared with them and look at them both in light of their daily use case, the two of them like to prepare food together and separately, and they want to be able to do dishes in tandem. So they wanted two sinks, for example. But also they got to think about how they will host in the house, and no matter what else needed to be sacrificed, they understood that we needed to make sure there was room for a small but comfortable space in the kitchen where their kid can do homework after school, where two adult guests could comfortably sit and rest while activity was swirling around the kitchen, and where they themselves could just take a load off inside the kitchen.

Della Hansmann 

So we were able to prioritize a slightly smaller island and a built in eat in area for their design. This will be where we go, and it just smoothed out the process of making decisions. Having guests over is such a perfect test run for how you might live in the house in a more social way once it is remodeled, and if your house right now isn’t something that makes you particularly proud, if it’s too run down or too small or it isn’t what it will be once you have remodeled, the holidays are one of the few times when you’re likely to have people over anyway, because what else are you going to do?

Della Hansmann 

The family has to come over, or you’re going to go to other houses for other holiday events and take note of how other people’s homes work to hold more than just the day to day occupants. Anytime we do something three times, it’s a tradition, and we have now replayed this how to use the holidays to plan a remodel episode three times, because it’s just that good. This contains my best advice for capturing the feelings, ideas, solutions and vibes of the holiday hosting and visiting in a way that you can incorporate into your next year’s remodels plans. Cheers.

Della Hansmann 

So I told you, I want you to use this holiday to plan your remodel, and by that, I do not mean that you should be pricing finished products while you try to lay out the menu for your next holiday meal. By the way, I’m recording this episode and talking to you now about the holiday season of 2022 but you can use this advice for any out of the ordinary or special occasion time in your life, hosting a family member or your own wedding, a string of family birthdays, bing bang, boom, with a lot of guests coming over every weekend in a row.

Della Hansmann 

This is our chance to work on and create your vision for your overall remodel. In fact, the driving voice behind my making this episode today is that I feel like one of the biggest mistakes that gets made planning a remodel any time of the year is to skip over or rush through a crucial phase of planning for success, asking yourself what your home really needs added, subtracted or adjusted in order to suit the life you want to leave in it with your family.

Della Hansmann 

Or just having friends come and stay for a particularly long time, can be the kind of occasion that lets you look at your home with a fresh perspective. But why we’re talking about this now is that holidays are naturally a pinch point. They’re also an annually repeating event that you can check yourself with on how long it’s been since you first thought we have to make this change in our house and then let life get away with you. So we’re going to discuss the magic that’s possible when you use the holidays to plan your remodel.

Della Hansmann 

This is the make or break factor that determines the difference between remodels that look good but don’t satisfy you and the ones that really fit your family to a T. I don’t want you to end up living in a house for someone else. So skipping over the fit your house plans to your life stage, aka the dream stage, happens way too often. This is what goes wrong on most remodels, in my experience, and it always results in scope creep.

Della Hansmann 

So you’re spending more money, or in spending more time, energy and money on the wrong things for you. Watch out. Look, I get it. This feels like a fast track. Skip over too much worrying about what you want the house to feel like, so you can get right down to the important things, like choosing tile. But in the long run, it will cost you. It doesn’t take that much time, especially when it’s guided.

Della Hansmann 

So use the dream phase interspersed with your regular life, like right now as you plan for the holidays, to help you plan your ideal home update, well, making sure you take time for Dream is also the best possible way to fit your project to your budget. Yes, I’m going to tell you to dream big dreams. Consider outrageous things, but then figure out what matters to you most.

Della Hansmann 

This goes back to the budget and planning episode we had just before the holidays, and that was talking about how important it is to set your whole remodeling scope to know what matters to you most, before you figure out what a reasonable budget for that scope of work might be. And it will really help you actually to plan the most efficient use of a big remodeling budget, or to make the most use of a micro remodeling budget.

Della Hansmann 

Either way, if you’ve started the process by asking yourself what the home really needs in order to be your ideal home, all the answers you create along the way of the process of planning are going to be better answers than if you don’t ask yourself why in the beginning.

Della Hansmann 

All right, so I actually want you to fit some of the. Why thinking right into your holiday festivities while you’re experiencing them, or after the fact, keep an open mind to things that could change your house for the better in the next holiday season or through the year in between holidays, you can do this in one of two ways. Actually, I’m going to recommend you do it in both.

Della Hansmann 

The first one is use the fresh eyes that you get when you’re preparing to host now, as you’re preparing to host other people in your home, or even as you’re just preparing to make your house for your normal family a little more festive than just its day to day life, you will naturally take a fresh perspective on rooms, objects and the overall house in a way that’s easier to gloss over or blur your eyes across in daily life.

Della Hansmann 

Now, this isn’t a time when you want to berate yourself or over anything that’s not exactly how you want it to be. In fact, it’s a great opportunity to keep an open mind and think about what’s rubbing you the wrong way as a useful item and add it to your design to do list for the future. Your focus right now is just having a good holiday this year, but if something starts to annoy you, and this could be anything from a repetitively hard to clean surface like a countertop that always needs repolishing every time a new guest has scheduled to come over.

Della Hansmann 

Or the fact that it feels like there’s nowhere to get away and have a little alone time when you have one extra guest in the house and they’re occupying the guest room that you usually use for your morning meditation, Make a note, this is actually a two for one. One, you’re winning future, planning, thinking for free, without having to sit down later and rack your brains and try to consider how this could work. What are the problems you have with your house? They’re not even in your face right now, so you’re not thinking about them.

Della Hansmann 

So you’re saving yourself future work and two, this is a redirect from holiday annoyance to problem solving. Isn’t that a nice added benefit? This can actually reduce holiday stress, because every time you identify an issue, you can file it away and know that it’s something you want to address later. I think it really works well on both levels, and I do this myself all the time.

Della Hansmann 

Perhaps you’re familiar with the feeling of using a little bit of anxiety of company coming over, whether for dinner or to stay overnight, as a reason to extra clean your house to a standard you haven’t managed in a minute. By the way, if you don’t find this relatable, then my hat’s off to you. You are a better person and a better housekeeper than I am. I actually love the process of knowing I have to host someone and thinking, Oh, that pile of stuff that always sits by the front door. It’s been there for months. I haven’t touched it. It’s just actually gathering dust.

Della Hansmann 

Now I’m gonna make it go away, not for me, although I’ll enjoy that later, but for my guest, you can use the same energy in the holidays, and I’m sure this sounds like something you might do. It’ll help you also see your house in a whole new light. Just knowing that someone else is going to come in and look at your spaces. Will help you examine the corners, the unfinished projects, all the little things that just didn’t get done in your last burst of DIY energy, you can see how they lose urgency during the course of the year, and it’s not the time to go in and do those things now, although, if you feel the energy to fix a small DIY project with energy from the holidays, more power to you. It’s just the time to make a note.

Della Hansmann 

Now, I’m not going to give you a right answer as to how to capture these thoughts as you’re having them. Other than to say that I want you to choose a method that is easy for you. Jot them down in a notebook. Start a fresh Google Doc and write them down on your phone. Begin a checklist, put them in your notes app, write them in your journal, or just say them out loud to someone else in your family in a constructive way, not a critical way, so that you both have it in your head for the next time you sit down and really start on a remodel planning process, you can also use, like I said that, oh no, people are coming over energy as a motivation to move forward on a couple of small projects and home improvement.

Della Hansmann 

And if that works for you, I salute you. Don’t hold back. But if you don’t have time to actually do any of the things that are coming up as you start to prepare for the holidays, that’s okay. Just writing them down is a positive action that will help you feel better about hosting this year and make this time pay for your own future energy in the new year.

Della Hansmann 

All right, that’s part one, part two of using your holidays to plan your remodel is the post-game analysis, the post host analysis, if you will. This can actually happen while you’re in the middle of hosting, too, after you’ve hosted, or even when you’ve got a packed house. Use that same documentation process we just discussed, whatever might be notes, app, jotted down list stuck to the fridge. What have you to capture your thoughts about how the House is working to either hold extra holiday people or even just hold extra holiday energy.

Della Hansmann 

Now, a word of warning on this, I highly do not recommend that you think about how full your house feels at the holiday and then use that as a reason to justify expanding your house physically to fit the maximum number of people who could ever visit or stay with you. This is something I see all the time happen with empty nester parents. They’ll often want to build, buy or remodel a house in order to fit maybe not even their own current adult children, but any number of future grandchildren all at the same time. I love visiting my parents. And having all of us together in their house.

Della Hansmann 

I fully support the idea of planning for togetherness, but I urge you not to plan a giant house for the two to four weeks out of the year that you might be hosting everyone, when most of the year it will just be two people or a few people living and rattling around in a big empty house. That’s a recipe for excess and expense. It’s a way to bust your budget, burn out your energy, and it leaves you with just a whole lot of house to keep clean. Instead, my advice in this episode and across the board is always going to be about finding the right balance of a home you can live in all year round that still works to hold whatever number of guests you personally aspire to during the holiday season and other times of gathering through the year.

Della Hansmann 

Now that number also is very dependent on you, your family and your preferences. For some that just mean, mean expanding the house that’s normally the right size for just two to hold one or two extraneous, beloved relatives. For others, it might mean making room for a regular holiday party crowd on a Saturday of 70 with 10 extra staying the night, whatever it means to you. That’s the size we’re planning for. So be reasonable. I’m not talking about how to make your household five nines the number by adding on extra space for all of those people to stay in home comfort. I’m talking about making your house feel expandable and flexible.

Della Hansmann 

In general, I want you to notice challenges, not try to solve problems. I just want you to think about that later, but you might feel a burst of inspiration, which is well worth capturing now. So if you are noticing these things and coming up with great ideas, jot them down, or if you’re chatting them through with your trusted confidant visiting for the holidays, your mom, your sister, your brother in law who works in design, your older kids, take time to brainstorm with them in real time. If that feels fun, how can we in this moment accommodate a crowd, and how can we later modify the house in the future to do that job even better?

Della Hansmann 

You might come up with some great ideas on the spot, and so might they so ask around. I just told you to think about problems, not solutions, but here are some examples that might come to mind. One would be, how do you sit down enough people for a holiday meal in a space that’s normally meant to hold just your family without a formal dining room with a Mitch, which many mid-century houses lack, and that’s not a problem.

Della Hansmann 

Now this is not where I recommend that you need to build on a separate, enormous dining room, but it might be where you want to think about how your furniture and your built in elements are open to a little bit of special use flexibility. If you generally eat in the kitchen with a comfortable corner bench and a small, finely family sized dining table pulled up to it, what if the adjacent space is open to the next room so that you could put in more tables or Add leaves to the table. Grab extra chairs and expand that same eating space to fit instead of 4,10, or even just 8.

Della Hansmann 

Could you expand out by having extra tables and adjacent spaces? Remember, the holidays only come once a year, so you don’t need to plan for enough space to sit down 12 every night if you’re only going to have 12 in your house two nights a year. However, you might want to think about busting outside the boundaries of the House for hosting a large crowd to sit down here in the Midwest, it’s unlikely you’re going to kick your guests outside fully. But could you entice them outside?

Della Hansmann 

Could you create a space in your yard for a wonderful bonfire that will actually draw guests voluntarily out of the house. Could a three season room be turned into a three season plus two days over the holiday space with the investment of proper space heating or vents that are used only a few times a year.

Della Hansmann 

When you’re thinking about how to accommodate your overnight guests, there’s a bunch of handy solutions available to a mid-century house you can think about how to arrange the furniture in your existing spaces, to have bunk beds in your kids room, the bedroom that’s typically an office during the year, could still have a day bed or a built in sitting quietly all year round, but turns into a handy space to put up an unexpected overnight guest or the basement.

Della Hansmann 

 I always recommend finding space for a legal and safe bedroom in a basement in a house that has one that means proper means of egress through the stairs, doors or an egress window, well, this is maybe not the place where you actually want to put one member of your day to day household, although basement bedrooms are really fun places for teenagers, and even more so for bounce back to the household young adult children to have a private space.

Della Hansmann 

And for elder relatives who still have good accessibility, it can be a private sort of in law suite to put a bedroom away from the other bedrooms in the house with access to its own bathroom, but basement bedrooms can be a perfect guest space, allowing everyone to get up and go to bed on their own schedules, have a little bit of privacy before easily coming back together. I will also suggest this not to make any judgments about your family, but you might also choose, on purpose, not to expand the number of sleeping places in your house during a remodel, because hosting guests in your house is not your favorite part of being a host or is even actively something you don’t like. This is what Airbnb’s were made for.

Della Hansmann 

Have a place for everyone to come over and stay around till three o’clock and then identify several good local Airbnb options where they can toddle on off to their own space at the end of the night and come back after coffee in the morning. Just a thought, all right, I want you to remember that this is a time of stress, but it’s also a time of positivity and hope so.

Della Hansmann 

Take all of your holiday energy, all of your creativity, everything that’s going into thinking about the fun mid-century vintage decorations you can bring into your house, and how much fun it is to show off the work you’ve done, or even the plans you have for your house to your beloved relatives who are coming over.

Della Hansmann 

And use all of that energy to think about what your plans are for 2023 in the end, I want to make sure you also remember that taking the time to do this, planning to do this, what my home means for me, how it’s good for hosting and how it’s good to be undecorated for the holidays and to be holding just the regular household members really matters. Will set you up for the best possible remodel and the lowest possible budget.

Della Hansmann 

Bottom line, I would love to hear from you about how this process is working for you. If you’ve already had some thoughts pop in your head while you listen to this episode, then immediately, please go to Instagram, pop into my DMs at midmodmidwest, and tell me what’s hitting your mind. If more ideas come to you as you’re hosting through the holidays, I would love to hear about them and share them with some of my fellow clients and students, or you can pop into the mid modern model Facebook group where there’s a running chat thread that’s talking about what you have learned from hosting during the holidays or decorating during the holidays.

Della Hansmann 

Reconfiguring your home to hold more people inside, rather than spreading out to outside, as we have to here in the Midwest and in most of the northern states’ climates. I’d love to hear what hosting a holiday is helping you see in your remodel plan this year.

Della Hansmann 

Let’s wrap up with our mid-century house feature, and for this one this week, I want to restart the sunken living room debates. This is one that I don’t want to call it controversial, because people don’t really fight about it, but people either love or hate a sunken living room. They crave one and want me to add one to their house in a remodel, or they literally want me to fill in and remove a sunken living room from their house.

Della Hansmann 

We can trace this idea all the way back to 1927 when what’s generally known to be the first sunken living room, or conversation pit, was designed by architect Bruce Goff. But it really came into its own in the mid-century era Eero Saarinen and Alexander Gerard put one into there, designed for the Miller House in Carmel, Indiana, which is gorgeous. I’m going to, I’m going to put a photo of that one into the show notes page.

Della Hansmann 

It’s basically the entire living room is sunk into the floor. And then it also showed up in Saarinen’s 1962 design for the TWA terminal at JFK. Again, a big, gorgeous, standout color carpet area that sort of draws you to hang out in that space.

Della Hansmann 

Now, I personally have mixed feelings about the conversation pit. I get the appeal. It’s an amazing, cool idea. It’s got such a vibe panache; you can picture an extrovert throwing just a raging party in almost any sunken conversation pit. It also has a very 70s vibe, both in its inclusivity and its exclusivity.

Della Hansmann 

I mean, how do you make a sunken living room or a conversation pit accessible to someone who can’t manage a step? It’s basically impossible. Any kind of ramping takes up the whole space and ruins the vibe. It also gives a little bit of a swinger’s party vibe in the same way as the design for that 1970s wrap around sofa that’s really overstuffed and has an ottoman in the middle that fills up the entire space, which the advertising literature of the time basically says is for your swinger’s party.

Della Hansmann 

What was that called? I’m gonna look it up. Hang on. Found it? Okay? It’s called the playpen, and the ad for it literally says it’s not for everyone and has a picture of the world’s most uncomfortable looking grandmother sitting on it like she could not judge it any harder if she tried go to the show notes page and look this up, maybe I’ll do an Instagram post about it anyway. I love the idea of a sunken living room, but what I’m much more likely to do is actually pair this concept with an addition when you’re thinking about adding on to a mid-century home in California.

Della Hansmann 

In other warmer areas, the house is built on a slab. There might be very little or zero step down between the House floor and the outside. But here in the Midwest, we’re much more likely to raise a house about 12 or 18 inches above grade level, so that there’s a little bit of room for basement exposed windows to get some daylight when you think about adding on, particularly in the backyard of a house like that, a house that’s elevated a little above grade, you can think about, rather than excavating a whole new basement space for the added on space, you can think about giving it a little more breathing room, bringing it closer to the backyard that it’s meant to be, inviting you out into and having it be a few steps to. Down.

Della Hansmann 

This gives you room to put in a ramp if necessary, or to have a nice wide couple of steps that are clearly delineated. Nobody’s going to trip and fall into them, which is the number one complaint about sunken living rooms, that someone in the household or a family member came over and literally fell into the living room. And you can get a little bit of benefit out of having the same roof line continue out but getting added ceiling height by actually lowering the floor. It’s a really fun design trick that we’ve used in a number of houses that had the right conditions for it.

Della Hansmann 

For today, though, I just want to ask, Where are you on sunken living rooms? Do you have one you’ve been dreaming up a plan to get rid of, like we have many Master Plan clients asked for in the past. Or do you wish you could add a little more pizzazz to your house with a sunken conversation pit in your remodel? Or did the idea of just putting on an addition in the backyard that steps down a couple of steps to be closer to the backyard really make you feel excited one way or another, the sunken living room is probably not going to be built into a lot of houses going forward, unless the owners specifically want one.

Della Hansmann 

So it is a true Time Capsule feature, and we can love it for what it is. I’ll put some great and the inspiring pictures of sunken living rooms into the show notes page, and also, I will link to that ad for the playpen sofa. It’s really something, all right.

Della Hansmann 

This has been episode 1908 check out the show notes page for any of those small business links, for the discounted links to mid-century design clinics, for the transcript of the good advice on how to plan for the holidays. And I hope that your Thanksgiving has turned out the way you would like it to.

Della Hansmann 

I’ll be back in your feed next week with an episode on the home of the future in the past and how we can integrate today’s technology into mid-century homes as we go forward. See you then you.

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