Does your garbage disposal give you a thrill?
Maybe you take it for granted. But you know who DID NOT?
The folks writing ad copy to sell our grandparents their new build mid-century homes, that’s who.
They were kind of obsessed. SO MANY new home ads from the early mid-century make a point to feature that this home comes with it’s very own garbage disposal.
That’s just one weird, wonderful detail that came up in my conversation with Atom Stevens, today. Atom is a real estate agent who specializes in mid-century and modern homes in the Denver area.
He and I both love mid-century design and today we’re chatting about what his potential home buyers see and say when they walk into a house with a time capsule kitchen.
His perspective as a real estate agent is blended with his perspective as a mid-century historian, a preservation activist, and probably even more of an enthusiastic time capsule house appreciator/aficionado than I.
I’ve talked a lot about the time capsule kitchen, the original mid-century kitchen on the podcast. I live in and use a mid-century original kitchen myself. But I think Atom has a particularly interesting perspective on this as a lover of historical specificity and someone who works with a lot of clients who share that love. So, the big question is does that love always extend to an original kitchen?
Time Capsule-ish Kitchen Eye Candy
This is a 1955 mid-century modern ranch home that Atom recently listed for sale. The original kitchen cabinets are still in place, recently re-faced with new doors to restore the original wood grain look. Quartz countertops and modern appliances. Noticed that none of the kitchen walls go all the way to the ceiling. An original set of built-in shelves is on the opposite side of the kitchen wall. This kitchen originally had laundry in it, which is still present.
The owners of this 1957 ranch home in Littleton’s Arapaho Hills had their cabinets re-built by a carpenter to almost perfectly match the original cabinets, but adding contemporary features like pullouts, and to adjust the height of the upper cabinets to allow for venting of the new induction cooktop. Contemporary countertops and appliances were added. The kitchen has window walls and a door direct to the backyard, and is still screened by a pony wall from the living room.
Original steel eat-in kitchen in a Cliff May Home in Denver’s Harvey Park. The countertops are original plastic laminate. The stove is not original, but vintage in its own rite. These homes had laundry in the kitchen, which is still present. The kitchen has direct access to the back patio and is still screened from the rest of the living areas by a pony wall.
A kitchen in a 1960s condo building that was beautifully restored and upgraded.
Original kitchen (with original green stain) in a 1954 Parade home in Wheat Ridge Colorado.
This original birch kitchen in a 1950s mid-century modern ranch home features an indoor grill that probably hasn’t been used in decades.
And some vintage newspaper ads that used kitchens or kitchen features as a selling tool, as well as some ads for kitchen appliances and cabinets.
Listen Now On
Past Episodes with Atom
- Cliff May Homes
- Become your home’s historian
- Turning up your home’s MCM charm
- Design tips from the Parade of Homes
- The Mid Mod-ness of a Neo-Mansard Roof
Resources
- Check out the Better Homes & Gardens home plans at archive.org.
- Get Ready to Remodel, my course that teaches you to DIY a great plan for your mid mod remodel!
- Want us to create your mid-century master plan? Apply here to get on my calendar for a Discovery Call!
- Need some targeted home advice? Schedule a 30-minute Zoom consult with me. We’ll dig into an issue or do a comprehensive mid century house audit.
And you can always…
- Join us in the Facebook Community for Mid Mod Remodel
- Find me on Instagram:@midmodmidwest
- Find the podcast on Instagram: @midmodremodelpodcast
Read the Full Episode Transcript
Della Hansmann 00:01
Does your garbage disposal give you a thrill? Maybe you take it for granted. But you know who did not? The folks writing ad copy to sell our grandparents their new build mid-century homes. That’s just one weird, wonderful detail that came up in my conversation with Atom Stevens today.
Della Hansmann 00:16
Atom, if you don’t recall him from previous fun history deep dive episodes, is a real estate agent who specializes in mid-century and modern homes in the Denver area, and he and I both love mid-century design, so today we’re chatting about what his potential home buyers see and say when they walk into a time capsule house, the innate durability of 1950s cabinets, the design of Cliff may kitchens, and the odd fascination of vintage ad literature on seemingly minor details like bathroom vanities and garbage disposals in the kitchen.
Della Hansmann 00:45
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 2405.
Della Hansmann 00:57
Before I dive into my conversation with Atom. If you missed the mid-century kitchen clinic that we held live on Saturday, we missed you, too. One of the FAQs I always get as I’m setting up these design clinics is, Oh, bummer. I’m busy that day. When will the next one be? I’ll sign up for that. And my answer is, usually, next year, maybe probably the last kitchen clinic we did was in February of 2025, before that, it was a pretty regular January thing every year. But I am an architect, first running a small business, drafting great options for my clients, working with my ready to remodel homeowners. And then, for fun, every now and then, I throw together one of these live workshops. I love them, but they take a bit of doing.
Della Hansmann 01:39
So I don’t know when the next one will be. It has not been put onto a calendar. In the meantime, though, you don’t have to wait a year or however long to watch the clinic because a recording is available. I will drop a link into the show notes page for where you can go to check out this most recent kitchen design clinic recording, as well as other mid-century design clinic workshops similar to our mini Master Plan format, diving in on curb appeal updates for mid-century homes, smart, small additions, owner suite, ideas and more.
Della Hansmann 02:10
What else? Oh, outdoor rooms like patios, decks and porches. Oh, and a style guide workshop. If you are getting stuck on materials choices for your mid-century homes. I’ve got a two hour workshop taking you from overloaded pinboard to products you might want to select. You can grab any one of those design clinics by just clicking on the learn with us tab on the midmod-midwest.com website. Or for some visuals from Atom and the transcript of the conversation and a direct link, head right over to the show notes page at midmod-midwest.com/2405. So here I am sitting down remotely with Atom Stevens.
Della Hansmann 02:49
His perspective as a real estate agent is blended with his perspective as a mid-century historian, a preservation activist, and probably the person I think of as being even more of an enthusiastic Time Capsule house appreciator aficionado than I am myself. If you find this conversation fun, be sure to go to the website or check in your podcast platform for all of my past chats with Atom.
Della Hansmann 03:13
He’s becoming something of a regular on the mid model remodel podcast, and every time we talk, I learn something new about some super specific area of mid-century history and fall a little more in love with MCM Denver in particular. So I caught Atom up on some of my recent kitchen conversations here on the podcast, and then we just jumped right into talking about it. Here we go.
Della Hansmann 03:33
I’ve talked a lot about the time capsule kitchen, the original mid-century kitchen, before I live in and use a mid-century original kitchen myself, but I think you probably have a really interesting perspective on this, because you’re such a lover of historical specificity, and you work with a lot of other people that appreciate that. Does that extend to a kitchen?
Atom Stevens 03:57
Yes, you know, in my work as a real estate agent, I get to see all sorts of kitchens every day, and I love seeing the time capsule kitchens. Part of it is just, I love seeing the original appliances still in place, which I see more often than you would think. I love seeing the original cabinetry, the original layout. I’ve even had a few homes. I even sold a home that actually had its original countertops. You know, we’re talking like Formica countertops from 1955 so 70 year old countertops in beautiful condition.
Della Hansmann 04:35
They can hold it perfectly well.
Atom Stevens 04:37
And so I love seeing them. I love those time capsule kitchens. I love seeing them in great condition, yeah, and even if they’re not in such great condition, you know, I try to imagine what it would be like living in a kitchen like that, but I got to kind of experience that even at my grandma’s house in Chicago, she had an original kitchen from the 1960s birch. You know, you’re. Classic birch plywood kitchen, and it worked great for her, yeah, but I do think about like my clients aren’t necessarily on the same page.
Della Hansmann 05:11
It’s a specificity of taste. It’s also a specificity of lifestyle, and a mid-century kitchen works best for gonna go out on a limb and assume your grandmother also actually me, typically a woman, but it could be anyone who likes to be alone in a kitchen and do kitchen cooking tasks and not be bothered and maybe have people come in and receive food from them and then go away and not bother them anymore. That’s what basically every variation of the classic mid-century kitchen layout.
Atom Stevens 05:43
Yes, and I think it’s probably good to talk about what makes a mid-century kitchen. So the biggest thing about it that distinguishes a mid-century kitchen from what’s typical today is the fact that it’s a room. It’s a room with walls, sometimes doors, but at least openings. It is completely visually separated from the rest of the house. In more traditional homes, it truly is a home with walls that go up to the ceiling.
Atom Stevens 06:09
Of course, in mid-century modern homes, the compromise to try to open up the space was to do what we call pony walls, walls that go up, you know, just about head height, so you could have a conversation over the wall. You could still connect with people on the other side of the wall, but your kitchen is still totally visually screened from the rest of the house.
Della Hansmann 06:30
That’s an interesting distinction, just to pause you there that particularly in the Denver vernacular, a mid-century modern house, even if there was open space, even if it was post and beam, there wouldn’t be a visual connection. There would be open space above head height separate the kitchen from a living space. Okay, interesting, yeah. So it’s completely invisible.
Atom Stevens 06:48
One house I’ve encountered whose original kitchen was actually open to the rest of the house. And that was an architect’s house that they designed for themselves. So that was kind of an exception.
Della Hansmann 06:58
They exist. I mean, you can everyone can imagine the Stahl House kitchen, which couldn’t be more central to the house, but that is the exception that proves the rule, because basically every other even, even to the architect designed houses, the kitchen is usually off to one side, separated and closed.
Atom Stevens 07:12
And like what I live in, what I live in is the cliff may kitchen, and that one, classically, has the pony walls around it and totally screens from the rest of the house. And I think at the time, just having those head height walls that didn’t go all the way up to the roof, that would have been very striking and cutting edge and modern. And, you know, I think traditional people would be like, I don’t, I don’t know the rest of the house.
Della Hansmann 07:42
It’s a moment of transition, right? Because this is the first time that your sort of upper middle class family doesn’t have domestic staff that’s in the kitchen during the day. Only the family is ever in the kitchen, but it still is closed off separate. We don’t, we kind of don’t want to know what’s happening back there That’s private.
Atom Stevens 08:01
And the one big thing that’s changing in the 1950s too is that kitchens are finally becoming designed spaces you’ve probably seen old film footage or books or whatever about. Researchers actually reach researching what’s the most efficient kitchen? You know? How can we make the kitchen experience better? They’re actually thinking about kitchens, which, before the 1950s the kitchen was a very basic, functional room that really had very little thought put into it.
Della Hansmann 08:29
It was a wood stove and a sink, like just a sink on legs with maybe a curtain around underneath it and a table and possibly a Hoosier cupboard, if you were getting really fancy to, like, keep all your stuff organized. Yeah. So the mid-century kitchen suddenly has cabinets. It’s built in. It has a flat countertop.
Atom Stevens 08:48
Yeah,
Della Hansmann 08:48
on purpose.
Atom Stevens 08:50
And builders and architects, everybody is experimenting. So we’re seeing a wide combination of things, the galley kitchen, you know, basically like a shotgun with counters in either side. We’re still seeing eat in kitchens, which would have been, would not have been unusual prior to the 1950s but some builders and architects were still trying to do that idea of having indoor, you know, informal eating space in the kitchen space.
Atom Stevens 09:16
But I think it was kind of practical. And I even still wonder today, how many, how much people are thinking about the practicality of having walls around your kitchen in that. You know, if you look at any new house today, or any house that’s been renovated, the kitchen is opened up to the living room and the dining room, it’s everything is now this great room idea, yeah, I can tell you, while I love what that did in our house, because we did take the walls down around our kitchen. The kitchen is always chaos. A kitchen is a chaotic space. It’s a busy space. It’s a multi-functional space, and it is rarely ever what I like to call camera ready so
Della Hansmann 09:58
right
Atom Stevens 09:59
you know, by. Not having a wall around your kitchen, you’re inviting this chaos into your other living spaces. And so there is kind of a compromise there. At the same time, though, you know, like, I sold a house a couple years ago that had an open kit that had a, you know, it’s a 1950s modern house originally would have had walls around the kitchen, but it was opened up.
Atom Stevens 10:24
And of course, one of my client, was where they were parents, and what the wife particularly liked was the panoramic view of the rest of the house she could it was kind of like control center, so she wasn’t in a box wondering what was going on in the rest of the house, she could keep tabs on the entire house by having it open.
Atom Stevens 10:48
So there’s a tradeoff, one way or the other, but it is something at least worth thinking about before you just automatically think, oh, we need to take all the walls down. Or, yeah, maybe I would love to live with these original cabinets, but I really need my kitchen opened up. I really need that visibility through the rest of my house.
Della Hansmann 11:07
What do you find when you I mean, a lot of people come to you because they love your eye for time capsules. So if someone is looking for original details in a bathroom, in the exterior, in other parts of the house, everyone is unique, obviously. But is there a general response people have if they walk in and see a time capsule kitchen, do they mutter about how the changes they’re going to make?
Atom Stevens 11:29
It’s real, black and white.
Della Hansmann 11:31
Or do they like it?
Atom Stevens 11:32
They either love it, or they are like, Yep, this is going away.
Della Hansmann 11:35
Got it.
Atom Stevens 11:36
There’s not much indecision either way, except for there are a lot of people get hung up on, Oh, I love the original cabinets. But you know, these cabinets have had 70 years of abuse, and they look tired and old, and, geez, we need to take them out. And that’s kind of an important thing I want to talk to my clients about is, you know, those cabinets, a lot of them were hand built, or if they weren’t hand built, they were handcrafted in a factory.
Atom Stevens 12:08
A lot of them are these birch cabinet, birch plywood cabinets, where they might be steel cabinets, but in almost all cases, these cabinets are actually restorable, yeah, which is different than today’s cabinets. Today’s cabinets, if they get damaged, they’re going to the landfill.
Atom Stevens 12:23
There is no way to restore them. But I at least love to put that on the table as an option that first of all, if you were to put a handcrafted wood kitchen, brand new in your kitchen today, you wouldn’t be able to afford it. It would be $70,000 $100,000.
Della Hansmann 12:41
yeah.
Atom Stevens 12:41
So first of all, think about what you’re going to be throwing in the dumpster. And second of all, do be aware that if you hire a good carpenter, these things can look like brand new without you having to put anything into the landfill. And you know, you bring the warmth of natural wood back into your kitchen, something that’s almost impossible to get with new kitchens today without, you know, spending an enormous amount of money.
Atom Stevens 13:06
So I think it’s at least worth thinking about as an option, even though, you know, it’s definitely not the path of least resistance. It’s work to find a carpenter and things like that, but it is an option. Don’t automatically think that these kitchens need to be thrown away.
Della Hansmann 13:23
Yeah, I think that’s a good point to make, because we are so trained in this time of planned obsolescence that when something gets damaged, particularly when an item of like fast fashion furniture, gets damaged, you can’t repair it if it’s got a veneer over it, the veneer is damaged. It’s trash, essentially.
Della Hansmann 13:40
But there are layers. There is real thickness. There is refinishing. There are repairs that can be made to mid-century kitchen cabinets, if you are so inclined, they can be stripped and given a new stain, if that, if you want to shift the like light to dark spectrum of them, there’s a lot of sturdiness.
Atom Stevens 14:00
Let’s say doors are broken beyond repair. A new door can be made.
Della Hansmann 14:05
They can be replaced. Yeah, yeah. I think that’s an interesting way to look at it. And it’s then you have to get into the question of it’s just like if you ask if your original mid-century windows are in good shape, if you ask a window replacement company, they’re going to say what you need is new windows. They’re better insulated. And here’s the price, you know, here’s the catalog. Pick them out.
Della Hansmann 14:27
You’ve got to go find a glazier and someone at your sort of lumber yard counter, handyman and Angie’s List person to help you craft like re craft your windows, but they can be repaired. You have to ask the right person. I recently had a great success story, actually, on keeping and reconfiguring a mid-century kitchen that was I talked about this on my YouTube.
Della Hansmann 14:48
I did a case study of it because the house had been owned. It was owned by a 100 year old woman who wanted to know that the house was going to go was going to stay in the family so it was going to her retirement age, daughter and son in law. And. They’d helped her out in the house and done repairs around the house for years. They loved it, but they didn’t want to use the kitchen the way that she had.
Della Hansmann 15:13
They wanted an island, and it was like a big, generous you layout, but it also had this sort of built in kitchen office desk unit that’s not as applicable to life today again, like, how do you live in a mid-century kitchen? But we were able to think about how to repurpose each of the existing cabinets that were in the wrong place into new places. And they found a local company that was willing to work with them to do that, and we just moved the missing pieces around the kitchen and turned a U shaped peninsula layout into an island layout.
Atom Stevens 15:36
nice
Della Hansmann 15:37
With all the original boxes, which was so fun. And I have, I feel like in the in the past, it’s always been either or for me, I’ve always had to talk about the pros, cons and compromises involved in just basically keeping what you’ve got and not damaging it too much. Or maybe an old section and a new section. Or it’s destruction and start flat if people don’t like the layout. And so that was really fun, success story.
Atom Stevens 16:02
That’s great. It is possible, too, and it does come with some expense, because you’re hiring a skilled carpenter or whatever to make whatever modifications need to be made. But,
Della Hansmann 16:13
right? But
Atom Stevens 16:14
You can reconfigure these kitchens.
Della Hansmann 16:16
I can’t imagine. I don’t know what the final price tag will be yet. I’m gonna ask them when it’s done, but I can’t imagine it’s even it’s a fraction of the cost of destroying and completely replacing that kitchen from scratch, even with the most budget boxes they could possibly have chosen. So yeah.
Atom Stevens 16:34
It’s funny you bring up the desk, because I’ve had a friend of mine, he had kind of an epiphany as he was renovating his kitchen, he put in kind of a desk area in his kitchen, in his argument was it was, for him, it was never meant to be a desk.
Atom Stevens 16:53
And he even wonders if, when mid-century designers put stuff like that in there that that was never meant to be a desk, it was actually meant to be like a lower height workstation, where if you wanted to sit and chop vegetables in a chair, you could do that.
Atom Stevens 17:10
Or imagine using a food processor or a blender at a lower height, and how ergonomically, that’s actually a better height to use those kind of appliances at.
Della Hansmann 17:19
Yeah.
Atom Stevens 17:20
So, you know, it doesn’t necessarily have to be a desk if you have something like that in your kitchen.
Della Hansmann 17:26
That’s true. You know, you were talking about the sort of science behind the ergonomics, behind kitchen design. And I just earlier in this episode series, I was talking about the design of the sort of efficiency based kitchen, work triangle kitchen, and at the same time, there was talk about what’s the ergonomic height for work surfaces? And there was a movement to have multiple heights of counter within a kitchen.
Della Hansmann 17:52
But there was a counter movement of having the least number of bacteria catching surfaces, corners, turns in a kitchen out of the sort of panic of coming out of Europe, out of the flu pandemic the last one. And so they really had this idea of like one monolithic, single surface countertop, and that was more esthetically appealing as well.
Della Hansmann 18:15
So that kind of caught on. And then we had the single height. Every kitchen counter in America is continuous, and it’s the same height, and no one asks a question about that. It doesn’t matter how tall or short you are. Doesn’t matter whether you’re baking, chopping or mixing. It’s always the same counter height.
Atom Stevens 18:30
Plus it makes cabinet manufacturing easier, because you only have to build one height of cabinet.
Della Hansmann 18:35
Take the options out of it, but you could, if you had to do you put a stand mixer into use. You could put it on the kitchen desk, and then you get those extra few inches. So I wonder how many of those kitchens actually were used that way. That’s really interesting.
Atom Stevens 18:49
One example I’ve seen, and it wasn’t even a desk, is if you’ve seen the Streng Brothers homes in Sacramento, California,
Della Hansmann 18:58
yes,
Atom Stevens 18:58
the original design of those kitchens had a lower portion of the countertop that usually divided the eating area with the kitchen, so it was more of an open kitchen arrangement. And so the idea was you could sit on the other side of that counter and use that as an eating area, but on the kitchen side that would also be a lower prep area.
Della Hansmann 19:21
Interesting, yeah, because table height is standard four to six inches lower than counter height. So you treat that like a table. You don’t need bar stools. You can pull up chairs to it, but then at the same time, you can put a mixing bowl on it and mix,
Atom Stevens 19:33
yeah,
Della Hansmann 19:33
Ergonomically, if you are of shorter stature, interesting. Well, we’ve lost a lot of that specificity in our kitchens. I feel like since the mid-century, we’ve been replicating the function of mid-century kitchens while shifting the layout and kind of downgrading the cabinet quality each decade successively.
Della Hansmann 19:54
But I feel like I see so many houses that are remodeled with a mid-century kitchen footprint. And but then, like 80s cabinet boxes, they just came in and one for one, replaced everything that was there.
Atom Stevens 20:05
right,
Della Hansmann 20:06
With something crappier and with a dark stain I don’t like. It’s so frustrating because it’s the worst of all possible worlds. But it’s interesting that we never came back and reimagined like what the kitchen should be, other than we should knock out some walls. We just.
Atom Stevens 20:20
No. I mean, you don’t hear about any kitchen research anymore. It’s just, you know, kitchens have actually, they’ve become like fashion statements. Now people are more concerned with the esthetics of the kitchen than the function of the kitchen, which is an interesting change.
Della Hansmann 20:37
It’s frustrating. That’s, I mean, that’s and that’s the thing that’s easiest to see if you look at, if you’re trying to be influenced, if you’re looking at magazine photos, you’re not really
Atom Stevens 20:46
sell you a kitchen.
Della Hansmann 20:48
We talk about what it looks like. The questions I always ask my clients are, you know, does one person cook in this household? Or do you collaborate? Are you trying to get your kids to participate, or do you want them out from underfoot?
Della Hansmann 21:05
Do you entertain? And when you do, do you want people to see the meal happening? Or will it be delivered to them? Like I’m trying to figure out. How will this kitchen be used? But that’s never when people go to a kitchen store because they need a new kitchen, that’s not the question they get asked. They get asked white shaker cabinets or what kind of countertop do you want? Or do you want a bold color?
Atom Stevens 21:27
And you know, part of it too is like when they’re building new houses, they’re trying to make a kitchen that’s one size fits all. They’re not even asking those questions.
Della Hansmann 21:31
Right? Well, and kind of in the mid-century, we weren’t either. They even, you know, in a creative development, the Cliff May kitchen is typologically different from your standard builder grade mid-century box kitchen, but it’s the cliff may kitchen, and it’s kind of the same every time.
Atom Stevens 21:49
It was the same kitchen that went into every house
Della Hansmann 21:52
for efficiency sake. But
Atom Stevens 21:53
yeah,
Della Hansmann 21:54
It makes, it gives me pause, because people’s kitchen use is so household and culturally specific,
Atom Stevens 22:03
yeah,
Della Hansmann 22:04
and yet we just, we just plug ourselves into the same fitted kitchen that exists in every house depending on its era, just like the neighbors, just like the neighbors, just like the neighbors. It’s funny.
Atom Stevens 22:16
exactly
Della Hansmann 22:17
What do people? I’m just fascinated by this idea of people who love a time capsule in every other part of the house but struggle with it in the kitchen. What’s the compromise that you see people make if they want to update the kitchen but have it feel connected? Or what questions are they asking when they talk about it with you?
Atom Stevens 22:37
You know, I think there are, there are people out there that they want to open the kitchen up, but they still want to have woodwork and cabinetry in the kitchen that looks like it’s of the period
Atom Stevens 22:49
And you know, that can be difficult to do, especially if the original cabinets aren’t in there. But of course, as we talked about, you know, there’s a lot of modification that would have to happen to original cabinets to open up a kitchen like that. But, you know, there are options out there.
Atom Stevens 23:05
There are cabinets that don’t necessarily have the look of the old birch cabinets. But you know, the one nice thing, the nice thing about the birch cabinets and even the steel cabinets of the 1950s is that they were very modern, sleek, simple, elegant, and of course, the closest thing to that today is the frameless European style cabinet that has just a simple slab door, very small reveals between the doors, so it’s a very clean look.
Atom Stevens 23:37
And it’s the most similar thing you’re going to find, especially if you have doors made that are natural wood finish. And you can, you can get pretty close to replicating the look, even if it’s not precisely the vintage look, because it’s not the original, you know, birch cabinet looks with the little bull noses on the doors and the magnetic catches and things like that, but you can get close stylistically, at least bring the warmth of natural wood into the kitchen while still doing new cabinets.
Della Hansmann 24:09
Yeah, and I think to a lot of people’s eye, that’s all they’re looking for. They’re just looking for. Is it slab style? They’re not concerned of? Is it a European frame and a full overlay door versus the face frame and partial overlay that you see in your classic birch plywood kitchen.
Atom Stevens 24:24
They’re not necessarily. Well, a lot of people aren’t educated on it either, though, because I think a lot of people don’t realize that the big difference between a face frame cabinet and a frameless cabinet is the ability to have that thin reveal
Della Hansmann 24:38
right
Atom Stevens 24:38
between the cabinets. It’s not possible in a face frame cabinet. You can get close with a full overlay door, but if you want the really clean, tight look, you want the frameless cabinets.
Della Hansmann 24:50
yeah, yeah. And I think that yeah, people aren’t educated, and they’re not going to see it in a showroom, necessarily. Certainly, they’re never going to see you’re never. We’re going to see in a showroom a face frame door with a partial overlay in a slab cabinet, modern looking style.
Atom Stevens 25:07
Most show rooms do not display the frameless cabinets.
Della Hansmann 25:13
So, it confuses people, I think, if they don’t know what they’re going into, by the way, I’ve talked about this before, I’ll, I’ll put a link in the show notes too. I have a whole breakdown with diagrams of all the different cabinet door questions you need to ask yourself if you’re trying to do a sleek, modern, European slab style kitchen, or if you’re trying to create a time capsule kitchen, what you need to do to figure that out.
Della Hansmann 25:33
But I do think it’s interesting that the construction method has just changed so completely that we don’t even really ask. We don’t really source the kitchen cabinets the way that they were made back then. People are surprised to realize that you can’t move a mid-century cabinet box from here to there like you can with a modern piece, because it is a piece of the house.
Atom Stevens 25:57
one, one big piece. One of the things that’s improved in kitchen design today is that cabinets are module. You know, modular. Everything’s on a three inch module in today’s cabinets, so you can plan around that. Then,
Della Hansmann 26:10
right?
Atom Stevens 26:11
You know, all your appliances are on that module. All your cabinet boxes are going to be sold on that module.
Della Hansmann 26:18
When you walk someone into a house that has its original appliances. Is anybody saying, can I keep these or are they saying the one
Atom Stevens 26:28
The one thing they see is that they’re beautiful.
Della Hansmann 26:30
They are and you know, it’s not that Planned Obsolescence didn’t exist at all in that time period, but the boldness of it was nothing like what it is right now. I mean, you can buy a high end refrigerator these days and have it break in five years and have the appliance store be like, Yeah, that happens.
Atom Stevens 26:52
That happens, and we can’t fix it, right?
Della Hansmann 26:55
Oh, that parts discontinued. It can’t be repaired. Maddening, maddening stuff.
Atom Stevens 27:02
It surprises me how much of this old stuff still works.
Della Hansmann 27:05
right, and it may or may not be the most efficient. Uh, although the question of like, what is throwing away and buying a new one do in terms of World Resource uses, I’m not, I’m not sure that’s better to get a more efficient unit and throw another one in the dumpster. But, yeah, oh, I love the idea of someone wanting to keep and keep using those original appliances, especially if they’ve been well maintained and they’re still literally cooking.
Atom Stevens 27:35
Yes,
Atom Stevens 27:35
I love that
Della Hansmann 27:37
You’re not going to get them in a cute colorway like that these days.
Atom Stevens 27:40
No, no, not at all. Maybe if you go to a different country, but unfortunately, the way we live similar to how we do our cars here in the US as boring as humanly possible. So too goes our appliances.
Atom Stevens 27:56
If you ever find yourself in Japan, someday go to an appliance store, you’ll be amazed by all the different colors you can get a refrigerator in.
Della Hansmann 28:06
And probably all the different scales of size you can get them in.
Atom Stevens 28:10
Oh yes, different sizes. And actually, what’s pretty what I was what blew me away was the level of design. You know, our refrigerators are pretty basic, but I saw some refrigerators in Japan where they had many doors and drawers and things like that, all for storing different kinds of food.
Atom Stevens 28:29
You could set them at different temperatures and humidities, and you know, everything, you wouldn’t have to open up the whole fridge to shop for whatever you wanted to get. You could just open one small door and get whatever you’re going to get out of that compartment. Like there’s just way more thought that goes into their appliances.
Della Hansmann 28:47
That, though that goes hand in glove with a whole cultural approach. I’ve only been in Japan once, but I loved it, and it was amazing experience. But I think maybe one of the weirdly, I love to go into grocery stores in foreign countries, I feel like it tells you so much. And in Japan, I noticed that in a grocery store you could buy different amounts of pre sliced bread, and you could size the amount of bread loaf you were getting for your household.
Della Hansmann 28:48
So you could get three pairs of bread, or four pairs of bread, or six pairs. Like you wouldn’t just buy a loaf of bread, you’d buy the number of pieces of bread for the sandwiches for your household size. And I was like, This is a country that does not waste space, that does not have like, random assortments of leftovers. They are going to plan their meal for exactly the size of people who are going to eat it. I loved it so much. Yeah, so and they shop regularly, so they get smaller refrigerators.
Atom Stevens 28:48
A big difference between us, culturally and almost the rest of the entire rest of the world, right, is that most people buy their food fresh, and we buy it a week at a time or whatever.
Della Hansmann 28:48
Or more. Yeah. One of one of my first questions when I’m working with someone on a kitchen design is, are you as a household Costco shoppers, because that makes a difference categorically to the way that I’m going to think about their space.
Della Hansmann 29:04
Yeah, but that was not a thing people had access to in the mid-century, and the kitchens were not designed for it. Their pantry space was not designed for it.
Atom Stevens 30:25
That’s true, although that was one of the things that was shifting at that time, is that, you know, just like the neighborhoods are being built around automobile culture, instead of being, you know, having your grocery store couple blocks down to walk to, everybody had to drive to the grocery store in the 50s, just like we do today. That’s a tradition from the 50s that we’ve not let go of.
Della Hansmann 30:48
It’s hard to give it up. I The last time I had walkable grocery stores, I lived in Chicago, I had an apartment, I didn’t own a car, and it was great. I worked a mile and a half from where I lived, and on the way home from work, I would stop by one of five grocery stores that I could get to by just choosing different patterns through the grid, and I would buy as many groceries fit in my backpack along with my laptop computer, and take them home a couple times a week. And it was great. And then I moved back to a car city, and I have not been able to buy less than a cart of groceries at a time since then, because I’m gonna go, Well, it all goes in the car.
Atom Stevens 31:25
Yeah, it’s how our entire urban experience has been built. So that is what it is. Unfortunately, for better or worse,
Della Hansmann 31:33
It is, yeah, marvelous. So what other I don’t know, what’s, what’s your favorite thing when you see an original mid-century kitchen, what’s your, what lights you up about it? What do you really smile at?
Atom Stevens 31:49
I mean, I just love to see the craftsmanship of an original mid-century. You know, the original appliances, the you know, if you have birch cabinets in great condition, or even the countertops like, I don’t know. There’s just something about walking into maybe it’s because I just am reminiscent about walking into grandma’s kitchen, which had all the original details in it, but in particularly the kitchens that are the old birch kitchens, just having the natural wood in the kitchen, I think makes the space warm and welcoming.
Della Hansmann 32:21
It’s so lovely.
Atom Stevens 32:22
My house had steel cabinets originally, and so we ended up taking the steel cabinets out. My wife hated them, so she let me keep one, which she did have refinished. And so even the old steel cabinets you can make brand new.
Della Hansmann 32:43
Oh, imminently.
Atom Stevens 32:44
You get them sandblasted and then take them to a powder coating place or an auto body shop, and you can get them painted all the colors of the rainbow, if you want. You can actually have a lot of fun with it.
Atom Stevens 32:53
And I’ve seen a lot of fun kitchens with repurposed steel cabinets in all sorts of colors. Mine was the one that we kept was painted orange, so we have an orange steel cabinet that we up in our dining room.
Della Hansmann 33:08
What did you find a good home for the rest of them?
Atom Stevens 33:12
We did. I found we didn’t sell them or anything. We just gave them away. But yeah, we did find a good home for them. One of our neighbors, he tore his steel kitchen out, and he had it kind of visible from the street, and the metal scrappers took it. That’s not how I want to see a kitchen go away.
Della Hansmann 33:33
No, no. Better. Better things are possible. They don’t need to be recycled. They can just be continuously used.
Atom Stevens 33:39
Yes. And I’ve seen a lot of examples where, when people renovated their kitchens in the 80s or whatever, they took the original kitchen and they put it in the garage, or they put it in the basement. So I like seeing those too, those retired kitchens put out to pasture in other parts of the house.
Della Hansmann 33:56
And sometimes I’m like, can we, can we just go get can we go get that kitchen and put it back in your kitchen right now.
Atom Stevens 34:06
You just switch them out.
Della Hansmann 34:10
I mean, it’s worth, it’s worth an argument, I think. But, yeah, it’s, it’s fun, at least, to see the history of the house, and those gets, goes, goes down into the rec room in the basement, or, as you say, out to the garage.
Atom Stevens 34:22
Yes,
Della Hansmann 34:23
yeah, well.
Atom Stevens 34:24
I also love, you know, I’m a I’m entertained by seeing the mid-century advertising from home builders and things like that. And you know, that was one of the big things. If you look at a lot of the mid-century ads, the brand of the kitchen cabinets were definitely prominently displayed.
Della Hansmann 34:44
Interesting to top of mind, what would they say to promote a particularly fine kitchen, or just even an average one?
Atom Stevens 34:54
That’s a good question
Della Hansmann 34:59
I’ve put you on the spot.
Della Hansmann 35:01
Maybe you can share a couple, and we’ll put them in the show notes page.
Atom Stevens 35:04
Yes, definitely. I’ll share a few ads, you know, but a lot more, like a lot of them, were well known brands that people would be familiar with, because the kitchen companies are doing their own advertising and national magazines and stuff like that.
Atom Stevens 35:17
So and of course, appliances were a big thing. And if one of the most peculiar things is that probably the biggest headline on so many kitchen ads was the garbage disposal. You know, this house features the Waste King, dark garbage disposal. That was like the headline.
Atom Stevens 35:38
Like, I don’t know if it was just because garbage disposals were new, or, you know, there was during the 1950s a move away from incinerating, you know, burning trash in your backyard. And it was probably the notion, the original notion was that you’re going to stop burning your trash and you were just going to stuff it down the sink, which was an equally bad idea.
Della Hansmann 36:01
Horrifying when you think of wastewater treatment plants. But I guess at least, at least for food waste better? I mean, maybe we were getting away from people had been composting, and this was like, yay, step up to the future. Now you don’t have to.
Atom Stevens 36:14
Maybe
Della Hansmann 36:15
That’s fascinating. Well, I can’t think of any kitchen notes, but I remember in the 1952 Parade of Homes here in Madison, there was a big splash out ad for one house because in the bathroom, it had a sink with a vanity and a mirror, and they wanted to verbally tell us about that in a headline format. Well, they showed you a picture. It’s just like the most,
Atom Stevens 36:39
Vanity and a mirror!
Della Hansmann 36:41
A mirror. And I was like, What are you talking about? But then I was thinking about it, it’s like a lot of those sinks just had two little eggs and maybe a towel bar. So I guess
Atom Stevens 36:51
That is true. 1955 sinks were typically just pedestal stinks, sinks with no storage underneath, or anything like that. So
Della Hansmann 37:01
So, I guess you step up in the world
Atom Stevens 37:03
It’s striking how many ads featured the garbage disposal?
Della Hansmann 37:06
Garbage disposal? Yeah, well, it was, it was a, you’d have to add it aftermarket, if you, if you didn’t have a sink, that came with one.
Atom Stevens 37:16
Yeah, who knows how much, I mean, however much that cost in the whole scheme of how much the house was costing, which, I mean, at that time, was what $15,000 or whatever, it must have been significant enough to mention anyway/
Della Hansmann 37:32
Yeah, I think that’s an interesting thing to think about too. Is it’s hard to judge. I mean, you really have to get into the sort of cultural math of what is the value of a $15,000 house, then to a house now, but house prices have really ballooned beyond what they what other economic indicators would.
Atom Stevens 37:52
Oh, they absolutely have, they absolutely have.
Atom Stevens 37:55
All you need to do is like, you know, if you look at the CPI, the Consumer Price Index, use one of those little free calendar calculators on the internet. And if you put, you know, $15,000 in 1955 $15,000 how much is that today? I want to say it’s like 100 and something 1000, maybe $200,000 yeah. So that means that what we’re paying for homes today, 400,000 half a million more. That’s way more than people were paying for houses in 1955 or the 1960s or whatever. It’s absolutely exploded.
Della Hansmann 38:33
Okay, I’ve just looked it up, and yes, it’s so much less than that. Even $15,000 in 1955 is 184,000.
Atom Stevens 38:40
184,000
Della Hansmann 38:44
Imagine
Atom Stevens 38:45
We’re not just paying more because of inflation. We’re paying like there has been hyperinflation in terms of how much owning a home costs.
Della Hansmann 38:53
We’re paying scarcity prices. But that’s interesting, too, when you think about the specific cost of the kitchen in those houses. Which must I mean, again, the proportionate cost of a kitchen remodel. Today, it’s going to be your most expensive room, but thinking about the value that was going into a kitchen in a $15,000 house, how much of that was an appliance?
Atom Stevens 39:40
If you really have a way to look that up,
Atom Stevens 40:16
We’ll have to look at that offline. But I actually have if, if you’ve heard, have you heard of the Better Homes and Gardens Five Star House program? It was basically their plan service. Better Homes and Gardens magazine had a plan service where you could, they had a whole bunch of and actually, I need to stop looking at you and look at my camera.
Atom Stevens 40:44
They had a whole bunch of fix all this here.
Della Hansmann 40:48
Don’t worry, it’s fine.
Atom Stevens 40:51
They had a whole bunch of different plans designed by various architects, basically a big catalog of plans that you could buy floor plans from and have your own house built. And every year they would do some demonstration plans. They would pick some plans, and they would have 100 builders across the country build these plans as a demonstration. And of course, it would be like an open house for a month, and Better Homes and Gardens magazine would promote it, or whatever. So I actually have one of these five star home plans.
Della Hansmann 41:25
So they would choose 100 different plans and have them built all over the place, or they would
Atom Stevens 41:31
No. They would actually have built one plan for the year, and then they would have that plan built in 100 cities across the country.
Della Hansmann 41:37
Oh, I love that, because then there would be, you know, everyone could go see it, and also, you’d get sort of some, obviously not too much variation, but there’s this possibility that you could go track them all down and see that they still exist. And yes, some of them see how they’ve been modified over time. History Project
Atom Stevens 41:59
in the Better Homes and Gardens magazine that they published these in; they actually published a list of where all the homes are built in the country. Actually have an example here.
Della Hansmann 42:11
I’ve seen this cover.
Atom Stevens 42:12
This is one of the issues where they promoted the Better Homes. In this particular year, they actually featured six plans, and a builder could decide what plan they were going to feature in their city.
Della Hansmann 42:24
Which is the most our city appropriate version of it. That’s great.
Atom Stevens 42:29
And then in there they would have the addresses of all of the different cities where they had these demonstration homes.
Della Hansmann 42:39
That’s so cool.
Atom Stevens 42:42
Anyway, the reason I say that is that I have one of these five star home packages, and what better homes and garden would provide is they would provide a full set of stamped blueprints.
Della Hansmann 42:59
Oh, that’s pretty intense.
Atom Stevens 43:01
So there’s a picture of the house, and then you would have all the blueprints for building the house. They actually have an architect stamp on them. I don’t know.
Della Hansmann 43:12
You’ve got a full foundation plan, yeah, that’s great.
Atom Stevens 43:15
This is the stamp, right there.
Della Hansmann 43:17
What year is that?
Atom Stevens 43:18
This is Better Homes and Gardens? Plan five star, plan 2808 so you’d get the blueprints, you’d get a sample building contract that you could then use to hire a contractor, and they would provide a specification list, so all the specifications for building the house. And then I must have lost it in my folder here. Well, I’ve misplaced it, but they also had it also came with a materials list that listed all of the materials to build the house. So in theory, I what I don’t know is if the materials list had pricing on it. But if it does have pricing, we could probably actually use that as a guide to determine.
Della Hansmann 44:07
You could add up what was the kitchen.
Atom Stevens 44:09
Right? What percentage of that would be the kitchen.
Della Hansmann 44:12
So cool. That’s so that is so cool. Oh, you’ll love this, by the way. One of my current master plans on the boards right now is a better homes and garden. It’s a mid-century Dutch colonial nice it was meant to it’s kind of cabin. It’s like, it’s someone’s weekend home, and they want to retire into it. So we are expanding it ever so slightly. And my goal, and that, you know, their goal, and my goal is to preserve the mid-century Dutch colonial of it.
Della Hansmann 44:45
It’s got this fascinating gambrel roofline, great windows. It’s built into a hill. It’s delightful. And so I’m trying to figure out, like, how we can solve their specific space needs and make their kitchen work a little better, because. Guess what the problem is? It’s the kitchen without destroying what drew them to the house in the first place, which is that it’s in a gorgeous location.
Della Hansmann 45:06
It’s in the middle of the woods on a lake in a pretty part of Michigan, but also that it’s just fundamentally super charming in itself. But they have not all of that information. They, at least though, have the blueprint, the floor plan, the framing plan for the complicated gambrel roof. And it was basically the original owners built it themselves on site.
Atom Stevens 45:29
nice
Della Hansmann 45:29
following a Better Homes and garden kit plan.
Atom Stevens 45:31
So was it one of the, probably one of the Better Homes and Gardens five star homes?
Della Hansmann 45:36
They might have had all of that documentation originally. It doesn’t exist anymore, but that’s so cool. Well, fabulous. I would love to pour into that more. And if you’ve got any sort of photo documentation or scanned documentation of that you want to share with us, we’ll put it into the show notes
Atom Stevens 45:55
page for this episode, definitely. Yeah, I need to take some photos of these plans, because I have not taken any photos of them yet, but now is an excuse to do it.
Della Hansmann 46:06
If this feels like a good enough reason, we’d love to see them. And also, now for everybody, we’ve got a research rabbit hole to go down to of Better Homes and garden FIVE STAR home plans, which, yes, a new concept to me, too,
Atom Stevens 46:18
which. And I’ll send you the link. You can include it in the show notes. I recently discovered that the catalog, which I’d never seen before, is actually archived on archive.org so you can go there, and you can get a PDF of the Better Homes and FIVE STAR home catalog. So lots of homes, and it’s wild. How many of some of the best architects around the country, they had designing homes for their catalog.
Della Hansmann 46:43
That’s the archive.org resource is just so incredible. That’s really, really fun. Well, excellent. Okay, well, I think that kind of takes us through the historical mid-century kitchen. What was great about it? Who’s still looking for it? I’m glad. I’m so glad that there are people you’re talking to who are looking at an original kitchen sometimes and saying, Hey, let’s just keep it.
Della Hansmann 47:10
I never hear from those people, because people usually don’t need me to design a master plan remodel for their house if they aren’t planning to change the kitchen, right? They’re working at a smaller scale. And hats off to them. I don’t want those people to hire me to destroy their kitchen. I want them to keep it.
Della Hansmann 47:28
That makes me happy to know that that’s happening, though. So yeah, that’s really, really great to hear. And the question of how to sensitively update a kitchen is an interesting one. And as you say, you’re gaining things and you’re losing things. You’re losing the ability to have a chaotic mess in your kitchen and not have that be everybody’s problem. But you get the view of the rest of the spaces too.
Atom Stevens 47:49
Yeah. I mean, I think there’s a lot of good arguments for opening it up. You know, whether you’re a parent keeping track of your kids, or you entertain a lot and you don’t want a wall blocking your conversations. I get it. I get why people want to do it. I also, some days I wish I had walls around my kitchen
Della Hansmann 48:09
well, and I will say, mid-century design choices that have been lost to the sands of times. I’ve never seen one of these in the wild, but I have seen them in drawings. One of the solutions to that was a wooden curtain wall that you could pull around the kitchen when you wanted to close it off. You could open it back up if you wanted to.
Atom Stevens 48:26
Not a bad idea. I feel like I’ve heard of that being done at one point, but I can’t think of a specific example.
Della Hansmann 48:34
I did a house. I did a remodel for a house that had been like horribly attacked by flippers in the meantime, but all of the houses in their neighborhood were part of like five plan sets, and that someone had put together original documentation. And in the original kitchen of those houses, there was a folding wooden screen that
Atom Stevens 48:52
nice.
Della Hansmann 48:53
It might have come from two corners and met at a post on the edge and fully walled a kitchen versus open again.
Atom Stevens 49:01
That would be wild. I have seen in the wild a dining room done that way.
Della Hansmann 49:06
Oh, interesting.
Atom Stevens 49:07
Where the dining room was open to the house, but it could be closed off with two wood partitions that met, met in the corner. And I think the idea behind that is that that was, it was another example. It’s an architect’s home.
Della Hansmann 49:22
We have our clever little ideas.
Atom Stevens 49:24
I think the idea was that if he was going to have a client meeting at his house, he could close the room off and treat it as a conference room instead of a dining room for business purposes, which, I mean, that’s a great idea.
Della Hansmann 49:38
Practical. I’ve also seen, I’ve seen in drawings, never in reality anymore, sort of a third bedroom set up that way so you could treat it like extra living space, or you could close it off and make it guest space.
Atom Stevens 49:50
There’s one model home in my neighborhood that was designed that way. Unfortunately, none of the walls exist anymore that way. But there was one model that had, it was, you could have it as a multi-purpose room, but when you had guests, you could close it off and use it as a guest room, or whatever.
Della Hansmann 50:09
It’s I mean, it’s great in theory. I think it requires a certain a lighter attitude to privacy. I mean, you’ve got some clothes back there, but, like, there’s no sound separation between those two spaces. So I think it’s the sort of thing that either works better in theory than in practice, or it just doesn’t fit with our modern concept of like the guest suite that is fully independent, which is what I get asked for when people are thinking about
Atom Stevens 50:36
I appreciate the experimentation anyway.
Della Hansmann 50:39
Yeah, well, and I also, you know, again, it’s not the only reason houses used to be a lot cheaper, but they also used to be a lot more small and multifunctional. So that kind of clever thinking did allow you to save square footage.
Atom Stevens 50:51
Because they had to be. And you know what? It wouldn’t hurt us to look back to the 1950s and 60s again, as our living spaces are starting to shrink here in the 21st Century, because they are and we need to start being more creative again about how we use our space.
Della Hansmann 51:05
And yeah, I mean, that’s an interesting note to go out on, and not necessarily kitchen themed. We can have more efficient kitchens, although no one’s usually asked me to make their kitchen smaller. But our houses don’t need to be as big as the sort of extreme end of American square footage, like, particularly, I think even if you’ve got a young family in the house, you’re thinking eventually of being empty nesters there, and how much space do two people really need?
Della Hansmann 51:31
And even if we’re cycling fully occupied houses through, like, there’s just a lot of space in a house that isn’t being used at any given moment. So thinking about how things can multitask through the day, through the season, through the year, and not designing houses for the largest possible square footage.
Atom Stevens 51:46
And I live in a tiny house, and it’s hard some days, for sure, we have a lot of us in a very small house, because I’ve got two kids and wife and dog and chickens and all the things and activities.
Atom Stevens 51:58
But I love living on one floor, and what I’m seeing today in terms of new houses, is land has gotten to be so expensive that builders are still trying to build the same square footage they were building 10 years ago, 20 years ago, and the only way they can figure out how to do it is to now have three story homes, four story homes. And it makes me exhausted just looking at it, and I can’t imagine having my living space so broken up.
Atom Stevens 52:22
So any way we can try to put our living space on one floor while still dealing with having smaller lots, I think would be great for new builders. But hey, there are 1000s upon 1000s upon 1000s of beautiful mid-century homes you could move into right now and you don’t need to buy a new home.
Della Hansmann 52:41
It might even have an original kitchen.
Atom Stevens 52:44
It might.
Della Hansmann 52:48
Atom has so many opinions on mid-century kitchens. Honestly, though, the thing I needed to take away from it the most is that the classic builder basic mid-century kitchen is defined by being a room with four walls, which just is not the way we think about a kitchen in most cases today, we really, we don’t treat it that way anymore.
Della Hansmann 53:08
We don’t want it to function that way anymore, for the most part, although, as I always say, I have certain clients, certain Master Plan clients, who are specifically looking for a mid-century style kitchen, if you have a single cook household, one person in your family, grouping goes in the kitchen, produces complicated food products, wants to be left alone while they do it, and then comes on out to share what they’ve done with everyone else.
Della Hansmann 53:32
A mid-century kitchen, a room surrounded by walls, can be perfect for everyone else. We need to come up with some ways to moderate, modulate, modify what’s going on, hopefully without having to destroy original mid-century charm. If you want to see some of the images we talked about on this episode, read the transcript. Find links to other conversations I’ve had with Atom, for example, I’ve got a great one on his story of becoming a historian of his own home, and how you can learn more about the history the background of your house, specifically of your neighborhood, of mid-century history in your region and town.
Della Hansmann 54:11
Also a deep dive into Cliff may homes on which Atom is inarguably an expert, plus our fun conversation last time, just getting into the specific micro genre of mid-century homes with mansard roofs.
Della Hansmann 54:26
You can find all of those links on the show notes page at mid mod, dash, midwest.com/ 2405 and that is all for now. Mid mod modeler. Catch you next week.