What is the kitchen renovation industrustrial complex? This is the system that pushes us toward renovations designed with a built-in expiration date. It encourages us to follow trends seen on HGTV or Pinterest, leading to homes that look like everyone else’s and feel dated just a few years down the line.
The solution? Push back by focusing on a renovation that is timeless, personalized and designed to fit your home and your life.
I was reminded of this last weekend during a tour of beautiful mid-century homes. One home had a kitchen that stopped me in my tracks.
As I stood there, I honestly couldn’t tell if the kitchen had been recently updated or if it was the original design. The cabinets were beautiful, sleek slab fronts, the layout was practical and the whole space felt so modern. When I finally got the chance to ask, I discovered the truth: the cabinets were original to the 1965 design by architect Norman Millet. They were so well-designed and cared for that they remained completely fresh and functional nearly 60 years later. AND the kitchen had been renovated around them to function better for the homeowners. There were new countertops, appliances and lighting, as well as a hidden pantry.
What made this kitchen so timeless? It was never about a passing trend. Instead, its beauty came from a design that was perfectly tailored to the home and its purpose. It followed the original DNA of the house prioritizing practicality and aesthetic cohesion over trendy design. This has always been my goal with clients – to create a design that is so flexible and well-thought-out that it will last a lifetime.
A truly timeless kitchen renovation isn’t about creating a time capsule (unless that is your dream!). It’s about making choices that serve your family, your budget, and the unique character of your home.
So, how do you stay true to your home and your life when planning a kitchen renovation?
- Take the time to determine what truly matters to you in your home, not what a magazine or social media feed says is “in”.
- Step away from the madness that is the kitchen renovation industrial complex. Seek out period references, pros who will work with your vision and other like minded remodelers. Your “ReMod Squad”!
- Keep as much of what exist as you can. This saves you money and it keeps valuable material out of the landfill. And, depending on the condition of your kitchen, it could mean only preserving plumbing locations or going as far as trying to save your original cabinet boxes.
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Episode Resources
- Join me for Architect Office Hours! These are usually only for Ready to Remodel Plus students, but this month I’m hosting an extra office hours open to everyone on September 22nd at 6 pm (Central). Sign up and submit your question!
- Proof the Kitchen Renovation Industrial Complex is alive and well? Your 2024 renovation is already out of date.
- Okay, but what is an “industrial complex”?
Remodeling Resources
- Join me for a FREE LIVE remodeling strategy session on September 27th!
- 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
00:00
You’ve heard of the military industrial complex and probably the wedding industrial complex. Let’s talk about the kitchen renovation industrial complex. What is it? What does it mean for you? Is there any way to game this system or avoid it entirely?
00:15
Certainly, you can sidestep the pressure of real estate, of HGTV, of Keeping Up with the Joneses and the planned obsolescence of household appliances in general, to take on a kitchen renovation that actually contains the elements you want and not a whole heck of a lot more. So today is going to be part rant and part advice on how to avoid that chaos, like the money pit that it is, and how I prepare for my clients’ renovations designs that fit their homes as precisely as I can to the scale of change, they really want.
00:44
Hey there. Welcome back to midnight 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 2207 so before I get into the episode and my half rant, half pep talk, trying to arm you to push back against the kitchen renovation, industrial complex and maybe capitalism as a general rule, in the way it guides and shoves us towards doing more than we need, more than we feel like, more than what we personally enjoy, just to keep up with everyone else is doing.
01:18
I want to share a couple of items of business, but first, I want to reflect on the magnificent weekend I just had attending the atomic ranch guided tour of mid-century homes in Chicago’s North Shore. This was actually done in partnership with Chicago modernist collective, which is an amazing org that I discovered right at the beginning of my interest in mid-century, eight years ago, and they’ve been doing the fighting, the good fight for much, much longer than that, but they put together this fabulous tour with a couple of events. I was not able to attend a cocktail party and a Sunday tour, but I was able to go to the Saturday event, seeing five beautiful homes in Riverwoods, in Highland Park and in Lake Forest, chatted with the homeowners and with people who are familiar with the houses, and just took so many pictures and videos that I will be sharing have been I think at the time of this podcast airing, I will have been sharing them all week.
02:14
I particularly wanted to reflect on one of the houses that I saw last in Lake Forest, that when I walked into the kitchen space, I came in the front door, I was in a little bit of a rush, because it was the last it was the second to last house on my stop and to fit five houses in a three hour period that you have to travel between them with, like 20 to 30 minute drive times in between, you run out of time very rapidly.
02:41
So I was kind of in a rush, trying to capture it without really taking it in. And I hit the kitchen, moving in through the entry, through the dining space, through the living room, appreciating the wide open spaces and the floor to ceiling windows. And I got to the kitchen, to the back of the house, and I thought, is this a really good update, or is this the original kitchen? And I could not tell. I really couldn’t figure it out.
03:06
I was looking at the cabinets. They were gorgeous slab front. They were set into the space in a really practical way. It had an island in the center. It had a very modern flow to a little dining area that went out to the back porch and then a gorgeous little inglenook area that clearly was original to the house, and I couldn’t tell if the kitchen was original, so I carried on through the house again, trying to make the most of my time photographing, being a little bit tapped out on and socializing. I’d done a bunch of chatting with acquaintances from the internet. Got to cut hello to Jakey. I got to meet Jakey Torres from atomic ranch for the first time in person. And I ran into a couple of my ready to remodel students there also touring, which was just delightful. Hello to you. So good to see you.
03:51
And so anyway, I was moving through this house, taking in details, trying to find photographs so I could process it all later. And then I ended up coming back up into the kitchen space just as a conversation was happening, one of the two homeowners was giving a tour of how clever the little built in storage in the inglenook space was, which was right next to just around the corner from the kitchen, and she was describing how basically, it serves as her invisible walk in pantry.
04:16
This is something I love to do, both to replace walk in closets and to replace walk in pantries, in people’s minds, something that you need to have, but actually a wall of clever, beautiful, built in storage can be just as convenient and much more invisible and more space efficient. And she was talking about how this is where her bonus dishes are and extra linens, and also the CD storage that her husband insists that they keep, because he doesn’t want to replace it all with digital and I just popped in.
04:43
I don’t know, it just big sister bossiness jumped in with my personal opinion that, like, Yeah, our digital media rights are getting more and more eroded. It’s a good idea to hang on to your physical copies of information. Don’t get rid of those CDs yet. Which caused her to laugh out loud and say that that was exactly. Exactly what her husband would say, and him to then pop up the stairs to announce that he’d been listening to the whole conversation, and he was marking it down that someone agreed with him. And then we just fell into a chat, at which point I was able to ask them, so is this the original kitchen? Go to my Instagram page and look, you know what? I’ll just I’ll put a picture or two, actually, in the in the show notes for this blog post, for this episode as well, the obviously, the countertops are new, but, and I’m going to tell you the answer right now, the cabinets are original.
05:32
They are the 1965 design by architect Norman millet, but they could have been designed and installed last year. I would design them myself. Right now, they were beautiful, sleek, practical, fit the space so well, opened out to the view to the backyard, had up down storage in convenient places, a little coffee nook, like I say, the walk around pantry of wall of built ins in the inglenook just around the corner, rather than blocking off a separate mudroom space, it felt so modern that I really did have to check. Honestly, I was reasonably sure that they were original, only because there was a tiny detail which I don’t think I zoomed in and took a shot of, but I’ll try to blow up one of my photos and show you a tiny detail of a little bit of exposed hardware that showed up at the top and bottom of each slab cabinet door on the inner corners, which isn’t quite how we would do door hardware today, but everything else about it completely modern.
06:36
And this just goes to there are houses, you know, houses you know, houses built in the early 50s that feel a little bit more vintage than timeless, sure, but there are elements of the mid-century design era that are so fresh that you literally, if they’re well taken care of, you can’t tell if they’re old or new. So mid-century design is truly timeless, and it’s always the right idea to pick up all of your material choices, your style choices, your esthetic cohesion from the original DNA of the house, whether you’re preserving it or putting it back.
07:16
Okay. Anyway, I have more to say about this, and I will have probably said it to Instagram in the meantime, since before this podcast episode comes out, but I just got back from that tour this weekend and felt so refreshed and full of good ideas and inspiration and sort of little bits of design DNA that I hope to graft into other people’s remodels as we work to bring back mid-century design that has been lost in those places. It’s so refreshing as well, to just spend the day surrounded by a group of people that also appreciate the value, the benefit, the beauty of mid-century design.
07:50
And so if you’re looking for a little bit of that feeling without taking a trip to Chicago or visiting one of atomic ranch on the road’s great events, then I would recommend you come to an event that I’m planning to host, which is I’m going to be doing the classic workshop I have given a number of times before, planning a mid-century remodel to fit your life and budget live again one week from this Saturday. So on Saturday the 27th I will be hosting this workshop. This is a masterclass in the process and the philosophy of everything that I do for my students, for my clients, when I do a consult, half an hour call with someone, I’m drawing from the master plan method, which is basically the framework that I use to create good designs for mid-century homes in every case.
08:38
So we will talk about the mistakes that too many people make when they plan a renovation, when they just pick up the phone and call a contractor and end up getting the default remodel of this decade, rather than really taking the time to think about what matters to them, to their budget, to their family, to the house itself, and then end up paying more and feeling more stressed and more out of control and getting more done than was really necessary.
09:07
So we’ll talk about how to tune a remodel to really fit your life, how to feel in charge of the remodel, whether or not you’ve got any design experience or desire, to feel like a designer in your process, how to ask for what you want and get it and how to have the information clearly available to share. And before any of that, how to figure out what matters most to you in the remodel process.
09:30
Yeah, I’m gonna get through all of that in an hour on a week from Saturday, very rapidly and efficiently, but then I will stick around after that and answer all of the call questions that will come up, because people who’ve gotten this sort of high intensity pep talk usually have follow up questions, either about the process or just things that are on their mind about their house. I love these Q and A’s that happen after the call, and its wonderful reason to show up for the live master class if you even if you’ve seen the recorded version that I like to keep online for people to find when they need it.
09:59
But there is also just this wonderful catalytic energy of us all being together, being on a live call with a bunch of other people who care about your mid-century house and their mid-century houses as much as you do. So that’s a wonderful feeling of camaraderie I’d like to invite you to. And then the other thing, actually, even before that, just less than a week from now, actually, on Monday, I’m going to be hosting a public architect Office Hours call. Now this is going to be a little different from the Q and A that I usually do at the end of my master class.
10:31
This is going to be an opportunity for you to submit a question in advance about your house. Go ahead and send in pictures to illustrate your question, things you have seen in other places you’d like to know if they could be applied to your house, pictures of your house to let us know what’s going on. So we’ll have a little web form that is linkable on the show notes page for this this episode, and also on the website if you want to go to mid mod midwest.com/office-hours, at this office hours call. I will follow the same procedure I do for my ready to remodel students. They get a monthly architect Office Hours call as part of their participation in the program.
11:07
And so this is actually going to serve as if anyone is part of that program, and you’ve got a half month question you just can’t wait to ask. Go ahead and ask it, but if you have just been wondering about something, you didn’t really want to make an appointment or schedule a separate thing or sort of or bother someone with it, but you’ve been wishing there was someone you could ask about something mid-century related to your house. Ask me, I would love to answer your question. So let’s get these all submitted. We’ll see how many come in, and I will go through them in as much or as little time as there is available. I will also do them in the order they are submitted.
11:43
So go ahead and reach out right away and get your question first on the list for questions I will answer, by the way, if you’re not available for that time slot, ask it anyway, and there will be a recording available after the fact that you can watch, so you can take your answer off the air if that is the best way. But in that case, I would say, ask a very detailed question, so I’ll really know where to tune my answer for you. If you’re there on the call, I will ask you follow up questions, because I’m the kind of designer who wants to put the specificity of the person who’s asking into my answer, rather than say this is what everyone should do.
12:19
All right, with that segue, I will just say you can sign up for the master class. You can sign up for the office hours call on the show notes page that is going to be mid mod midwest.com/ 2207 and I think all of this really ties into today’s topic, which is why we are so influenced to make non personalized choices for our home, and how you can push back and make sure that the choices you are making in your house, that you are paying for in your house, the changes you are assigning to your house, are going to be to your long term benefit and are really going to last in the house and be wonderful. So let’s make that happen together.
12:55
Cheers to loving our mid-century houses, and just one more time thank you to atomic ranch and to Chicago modernist collective for putting together this fabulous event, which was the joy of my month. Essentially, it’s just great. Anytime you have an opportunity to go tour other mid-century homes, take yourself up on it. You will never regret it.
13:17
So what makes a blankety, blank industrial complex. I’m going to turn to Wikipedia for this one, because I didn’t want to be more impartial myself in finding another source. But I think this is actually great. An industrial complex is a socioeconomic concept wherein businesses become entwined in social or political systems or institutions, creating or bolstering a profit economy from these systems, such a complex is said to pursue its own interests, regardless of and often at the expense of the best interests of society and individuals.
13:53
Businesses within an industrial complex may have been created to advance a social or political goal but mostly profit when the goal is not reached. The industrial complex may profit, financially or ideologically from maintaining socially detrimental and inefficient systems. How’s that for a dramatic reading of a Wikipedia article, but honestly, this says it all. Basically, it’s not necessarily planned, although many of them have been.
14:19
But certainly once industry, once businesses, find themselves sort of quantum entangled with a situation where they’re supposed to be solving a problem, they’re supposed to be delivering a result, but actually solving that problem, delivering that result would result in them not getting everything that they want, not making as much of a profit. That starts to benefit them more to create an ongoing system. So I said at the top of the episode, a military industrial complex. America has a booming one, and we have had one for a long time.
14:53
Say what you want about how this all got started. I think we can be more or less idealistic about the sort of pre mid. Century, moment of World War Two. Certainly, a lot of people threw a lot of their good intentions behind the idea of patriotism, bringing our boys home, getting it all done. But it certainly became a huge machine to get this overseas war powered up and running and going for a while. And it’s interesting that this sort of, I don’t know enough about our American military history to say that was the origin of the military industrial complex. I would argue, probably it’s been around for longer than that, but that was a huge spooling up of it, and it has never really spooled back down.
15:36
But there was a moment right after the war, before we found another war in Korea to keep it going again, Military Industrial Complex. Can we say that the actors benefiting from all of the profit generated by the business, the industry, the effect of the war machine, had a vested interest in keeping it going along. But one thing they tried to do right after World War Two was turn pivot and become consumer goods. And this is where we tie, really much into the mid-century moment. Much of the mid-century craze for home improvement, which has been around since the early like it’s the first moment of mid-century.
16:15
What was in your house? Was it stylish? Could it be modified? Could it be added on to had to do with American corporations that had been dedicated to producing munitions and other products for war, turning to producing and pushing consumer goods instead. And they took the same military industrial complex, profit economy, as Wikipedia says, and turned it to consumer goods, the entire society wide move to push women back out of the workplace, where we had been pinch hitting for the boys overseas, in offices and in factories, and getting all of the ladies back into the household to restabilize a prewar idea of what the economy should be and become the consumers for a lot of these new consumer goods.
16:56
Let’s see off the top of my head, I would name nylon wall to wall carpet was invented to create a new purpose for the nylon manufacturing industry that had been using had been dedicated to uniforms and parachutes and machinery components. All of our car companies had been producing bombers and tanks and other war munitions, and now suddenly were turned towards every family needs their own car, maybe two. Dow Chemical, DuPont, other chemical industry giants, turned from making war materials to selling Americans a new way of life contained in plastic, and kitchens were particularly the target of those repurposed materials, both specifically and societally.
17:35
If you’re curious about this, if this feels like an interesting moment in history, I will recommend again, Sarah Archer’s excellent book, the mid-century kitchen, for a well-researched history of the entire moment in time that was the mid-century kitchen and also getting into some of the industrial and social powers that pushed it the planned obsolescence that consumer goods company had actually already been waiting. They’d been waiting to introduce appliances that had a built in expiration date and they hadn’t quite they felt like nobody would buy it, people, consumers would resent it before World War Two, and then after World War Two, they tied in planned obsolescence with colored consumer goods for kitchens. Your colorway matched pink range fridge and what’s the oven, cooktop, oven, fridge, dishwasher, what have you.
18:26
And then suddenly you’ve got the colorway of this year that’s suddenly going to be out of style, and you can put in something that’s not going to last as long, although in the early mid-century, they were still building refrigerators that last to this day, and now we’re building and selling refrigerators that last five years, if you’re lucky. So don’t want to get too far off the crack there. But do go check out Sarah Archer’s book. I, by the way, interviewed Sarah myself for a really fun podcast episode back in 2020, what was the episode number? Hang on one. Like, look it up. Okay, it looks like that was actually 2021. Episode 502. The history of the mid-century kitchen with Sarah Archer. Go check that one out. It’s a it’s a really fun chat.
19:04
But all right, so we framed our topic the military industrial complex. I also called out the wedding industrial complex. And this is probably a term you’ve heard outside of politics, education and school, outside of your American history lessons. But some I feel like sometimes people will use the wedding industrial complex as a flip or a tongue in cheek exaggeration to whine about how expensive things have gotten a particular product might be, but that is misunderstanding how big, how pervasive this can be.
19:38
There is a wedding industrial complex in this country, and you can easily identify the effect of it, the symptoms of it, by just looking at how economy, aside the scale, the number of things that are involved in a modern wedding, if you look at the wedding of sort of a millennial and versus their Boomer pair. Parents versus their greatest generation grandparents, you’re going to see dramatic differences in the checklist of things that need to happen and in the concept of a wedding industrial complex.
20:12
There’s a real synergy between advertising magazines, what we see in television shows, what we see in our friends and neighbors weddings that we attend, and suddenly, somehow things become necessary that were once fun, little frills that someone did one thing and you need to do that, plus the thing that your other friend did at the other thing, and the growing intensity, extravagance, necessity of these big events that were once just, you know, a gathering of friends in a church basement or a courthouse steps ceremony a photo.
20:49
I don’t mean this as a criticism of anyone’s individual wedding. Certainly, I do not mean it as a dig on any of the talented and thoughtful, creative people who help create the weddings that their clients want, the bakers, the tailors, the event planners and others. Kudos to all of them. By the way, also charge what you need to fellow small business owners. The wedding premium is not actually a thing, in my opinion. It is simply the cost that is associated with the wedding industrial complex, level of complexity and chaos that we’ve all been sort of conditioned to expect.
21:19
Where I have a problem with something like a wedding industrial complex as a concept, and the way that it appears in our lives is not when people stand on the shoulders of weddings, they’ve attended to make sure that they get everything that they want to happen on their special day. That’s great. I think people should have a moment in time they can look back to that feels special to them, if that’s what feels special to them. But really the problem comes in when people are feeling like there are checklist items they must add into the mix on something like that day, which aren’t actually important to any of the parties of the first part, any of the people who are actually getting married, or maybe even their family, but they are the things that should happen, and this is how costs spiral out of control.
22:03
This is how people can spend more on their weddings than they might on investing in the down payment of a house, for example, something that feels crazy to me as a person who prioritizes the home you live in over an individual event day. Now I’m not going to quibble over whether the memory of a really special day doesn’t have a whole lot of value. It certainly does, and it has more value to some people than others, but the concept I wanted to just tag in here, the wedding industrial complex, is again coming back to that first definition. Thanks again, Wikipedia.
22:34
It’s not when it delivers on the goal. We aren’t talking about industrial complex when all of the various businesses associated with this event a wedding, are delivering what they are meant to. We have a problem when they are starting to make more chaos than happiness, when they are starting to create more expense than will actually create benefit in the lifestyles of the people that are going to continue to live after the day of the wedding. We start to have a problem when they are more about keeping up with the Joneses than they are about being happy on any particular individual day.
23:08
So all of that should lead us to a pretty obvious explanation of what I’m talking about when I say a kitchen renovation industrial complex, or perhaps a renovation industrial complex at large. This is the place where we have an industry that now exists not to provide kitchen renovations to people, not because, not to provide the end result of a kitchen renovation that is not to present provide a safe, clean, long lasting container for happy lifestyle of an individual or a family that lives In a house so they can produce food and socialize and come together as a group inside of the container a kitchen. The instead, the industry exists to renovate kitchens and renovate kitchens and renovate kitchens and renovate kitchens.
23:57
And sure, you know a business needs to be ready to rinse and repeat. I do master plans all day, every day for people all around the country, but I hope never to provide a repeat design service on someone’s mid-century kitchen renovation. I never want to come back and have to redo a design for someone that we already did, I hope to provide designs that are flexible enough and tailored enough and right sized enough that they are going to last a lifetime. That’s basically always the goal.
24:33
Now, people might move the requirements of a house might change. It’s not a crime for a kitchen to be renovated multiple times in its lifespan. But I would prefer to see kitchens renovated as few times as possible during the lifespan of a house. In an ideal scenario, we’re dealing with a house that was built in the mid-century era and is only now needing to be updated or upgraded. It a little bit due to a combination of maintenance failures, the necessary obsolescence of certain appliances and the actual change in lifestyle of that sort of idealized keeping up with the Jones’ mid-century family that lived in there and probably only had one person that cooked, produced food and delivered it out to their smiling, well attired dinner consuming crowd.
25:22
And now our attitude of a kitchen being more of the social center of a house, a place where homework gets done, people are grabbing snacks while food is being prepared, food might being prepped for delivery over multiple days of the week. We need different scales. We’ve got people who are hobby bakers. We’ve got people who are hosting major social events inside the kitchen of their home, not in some sort of formal dining room. So yeah, we’ve got a different purpose to our lives.
25:48
Obviously, I am part of the remodeling industry at large, but my aim, and I think what I’m hoping to convey to you in this episode, your aim should be to be as unswayed as possible by the kitchen renovation industrial complex, because it is not as an industrial complex formulated to benefit you or me. It is meant to benefit the bigger corporations that are producing the consumer goods that are going to be cycled in and then back out into the landfill of American houses over and over again throughout their lifespan.
26:26
One of the chief ways that the kitchen renovation industrial complex perpetuates itself is by installing trendy kitchens that go out of date. So part of what I’m going to talk to you in this episode how to preclude the influence of the kitchen renovation industrial complex is to plan a renovation that will not go out of date. Let’s talk to do that about what makes a kitchen go out of date. And this is really a game I play with my clients as we’re getting started, if they don’t know the date that their house was remodeled. Because, okay, I said the ideal was a mid-century house that’s being updated only now. The common situation that we mostly deal with, in fact, is a kitchen that was built in the mid-century house and then remodeled at some point in the 70s, the 80s, the 90s, the 2000s.
27:16
And it may actually still fall exactly along those layout lines of the original house. It might have been a replace and place kitchen where none of the social changes in our society have been addressed in the layout. It’s not easier for multiple people to cook in, it’s not easier to host in, but it has been put forward into an anachronistic, trendy moment that matches the date it was installed.
27:40
So as I said, the game I play with my clients is, let’s figure out when that kitchen renovation in your house happened. If they know, if they’ve got the date in their sale paperwork, I’m always curious to find out what it is, but I will try to take a guess beforehand, and if they don’t, we’ll try to figure it out together. And we will look at the cabinet door and drawer style. We’ll look at the color schemes, the light fixtures. We’ll look at the appliances. We’ll look at the countertop.
28:08
Even when all of these elements are of good quality, there is a story to tell, and that story, generally, is quite out of tune with the original era of the house and with whatever’s going on in current trends today, but the whole concept of a trendy house design, it’s a trap. It is the kitchen renovation industrial complex, and that’s true in bathrooms as well. In house exteriors. All of that is true. Kitchens are just sort of the most flagrant example, the most obvious spot. And as I say, when you’re thinking about a mid-century master plan, when you’re thinking about how to put the mid-century style back into your house, there is no more comprehensive place to start reinfusing that mid-century style into the house than in the kitchen.
28:56
And if you get your choices right in the kitchen, they will carry on through and be correct everywhere else in the house. So when we’re thinking about a kitchen that won’t go out of date, how can we avoid trends? How can we avoid a trendy choice? How can we avoid the 2025, kitchen renovation that the kitchen industrial kitchen renovation industrial complex wants us to install so that they can come back again as soon as five years from now, certainly 10 years from now, 20 years from now, they’ll be actually knocking on your door, and you’ll be ashamed to have friends over, because Yikes, how out of date is your kitchen.
29:32
But we can avoid that, not necessarily by creating a time capsule, but simply by giving our houses more incremental refreshing updates by choosing materials and a few style elements that would have been at home in the original kitchen design, even as we upgrade and update the layout as we personalize it to fit your life, because there’s another element that preserves your house from needing another kitchen renovation, and that is that it actually was done well enough to suit your life and your family.
29:32
So for example, I think I did. I just call out from the article. Someone was saying, Ah, no, I think I didn’t. But remember the Navy kitchen with gold period hardware? There was so much of it. And I was like, oh, there’s too much of it. And then they came up with a really cheap version at Home Depot. And now everyone has it. This ends up with a quote. It’s like buying a Chanel jacket and seeing it pop on at H M, if navy blue happens to be your favorite, favorite color, and you saw that navy blue kitchen trend, and it just made you desire to live and cook and spend every day surrounded by navy blue, knock yourself out, but I would recommend that you paint it all over your walls and not get it enameled onto your built ins, because it is a trend.
29:32
The more you’ve seen it in five places on Pinterest and it made you happy, the more you need to worry out about it feeling incredibly dated the next year, and you can also just choose to lean into the datedness and let your kitchen be your favorite style. One thing I actually really respect. I’m jumping a lot around on this episode, but this is a one more note observation about the homes that I find myself being called to remodel. A single owner home is often assumed to be a time capsule house. A house that one person has lived in since they bought the house in the mid-century era, and they’ve lived in it and right until now, until they’ve gone into a nursing home or an assisted living facility.
30:06
This touches on what I was talking about last week when I was thinking through the Master Plan process as it applies to bringing accessibility into a mid-century home. It’s not a one size fits all solution, so the kitchen that is designed to have accessibility accommodations for someone, again, not a one size fits all. Solution is a kitchen being designed to have accessibility built into it for one of the primary food producing owners of this household, for a regular guest, for an elderly parent that’s being served in that space, for a child who’s going to be encouraged to grow up and learn independence in that kitchen space.
30:43
Each of those different scenarios requires a different level of thoughtfulness, intensity modification from a standard kitchen layout. And even the term standard kitchen layout is such a misnomer, it drives me absolutely nuts when I’m scrolling on the internet and I see the best thing, the layout design you must have in your house this year when you remodel, and it’ll say, you know, you have to have an island. You have to have a peninsula. It’s one thing to talk about trendy materials, although those, as I’ve said, are just part of putting a date stamp, a timestamp on your renovation and making it go out of date sooner than it needs to.
31:24
But there is not a one size fits all layout. I don’t recommend an island for every client that I have because they are popular and look generous in Nancy Meyers movies. I recommend an island if my clients are social cooks or are sharing the food preparation duties with more than one adult throughout the household, or if they want to get their kids involved in helping to make dinner every night, an island is a really great tool, not necessarily the only one, depending on the trickiness of the layout, but it’s a really great tool to have in your back pocket to make a more social, friendly kitchen.
31:57
Not every cook wants an island based kitchen, just like not every cook wants a kitchen with a particular color in it. So I wanted to talk framing this in the concept of kitchens that go dated, kitchens that fall within the umbrella of the kitchen renovation industrial complex, and what you can do to avoid them. I pinned an article. Gosh, it looks like it was actually last year in curbed on this very topic that has a real snake eating its own tail effect.
32:32
You can I can feel the grip of the kitchen renovation industrial complex on the author of this article. I’m going to start right from the title, which is the immediately outdated renovation with a subtitle. It used to be that seven to 10 years was the shelf life. And now you say, how can this look dated? Already? The concept that 10 years was a good shelf life for an apartment interior, that ended that design has a shelf life. Makes me crazy. But this is basically starting to say that there is, there is no timeline. There is basically as soon as something has been done, it looks old immediately, the question, How can something look dated already?
33:25
And they go ahead and cite a bunch of examples of different New York very expensive addresses and how they’ve been set up. And there’s a little bit, I think, what they’re complaining about is how architectural design or interior design has been co-opted by fast fashion, that a new idea will come out in some sort of magazine, and then suddenly Home Depot will jump on top of it, and now everyone will have it. And then here’s the quote they use. It’s like buying a Chanel jacket and then seeing it pop up on H M, it’s painful.
33:59
And I Oh, there’s so much wrong with this. It’s so painful to me, so much snobbery and it’s a it’s also looking very much down on the self-declared experts of the TV renovation shows. But I think really the problem is just calling out the bigger industry wide thing that there is everyone’s trying to be unique, and then everyone’s trying to copy a unique idea, and it becomes this ever intensifying circle of something that needs to be new so that’s different from everything else, so that we can constantly have the new, the best trend, and come along forward. I will say this is a moment when I really respect the universality of the mid-century era, when it wasn’t considered to be a bad thing that everyone had the same colorful GE cooktop. It was nice. It made people feel comfortable that they matched.
34:54
Again, there’s danger in everyone trying to be too much the same that way as well. But I. Yeah, there was at least a sense that it wasn’t a problem if everyone had the same design as a good design. All right. Basically, I think when we start to get into these articles, these hand wringing things of, oh no, watch out that you don’t make a trendy choice incorrectly, I would say, just don’t worry about the trends. Don’t make a trendy choice at all.
35:24
In fact, if you’re paying attention to trends, look for what you can avoid. And as I’ve said many times before, if you see something that’s trendy in a magazine, in a friend’s renovation and you think that thing is really cool and it will make me happy. Go ahead. Make yourself happy. Your home is for you, but I will always recommend we make our trendiest choices in the most impermanent parts of the house, a trendy house color.
37:05
But it is often not a time capsule house. It often has an 80s or a 90s or an early 2000s renovation in kitchens, in bathrooms, because at some point the homeowner themselves just thought, I’m going to modernize this house. I’m going to bring it up to trend. Generally speaking, though single owner houses aren’t remodeled again and again and again. If someone is the kind of person who’s going to stay in one house for their entire adult lifespan, they will likely renovate once. They will likely not renovate repeatedly. So that kitchen to them, one has to assume, feels perfectly fresh. They remember the moment they got it set up. They remember the day they made those choices. They’re still pleased with them today.
37:53
And if that’s you, if you’re going to make a choice that’s on trend right now and then be happy about it for the next 40 years, knock yourself out. But if you’re trying to make a choice that’s going to make your kitchen feel fresh and different than what it is and be the kind of place that you hope to make a showpiece to invite other people over to, I recommend that you avoid, eschew entirely the kitchen renovation industrial complex urge to trend and focus instead on the original DNA of your house when you think about materiality, that’s I think all I’ve got to say on the topic of how to avoid visual trends in a kitchen renovation.
38:31
But now I want to spend the rest of the episode talking about how to avoid the kitchen renovation industrial Complex’s tendency to scrape it all out and start from scratch. That is often not necessary, particularly if your kitchen has already been remodeled or renovated at some point in the past. When we’re dealing with original, mid-century built ins. They are often built into the house. They are built in place by the original crew that constructed the house or small part of it, and they are not likely to be swappable or have easily replaced parts or pieces.
39:07
But if you’re dealing with a house that has, as any way, a generous layout and some elements of a previous renovation that are in good shape but don’t suit either your layout, lifestyle or your esthetic taste, there are changes we can make that stop short of throwing the entire thing into a dumpster in the driveway and starting from scratch. So I want to talk a little bit about the way I have handled several recent projects in my designs. And if you’ve listened to the podcast at all before, you know that I like to provide multiple design schemes to my clients, particularly for key areas like kitchens.
39:43
And we often organize those in a one, a two and a three scheme version the schemes kind of stacking, from one being the least we could do the most surgical strike mission we can perform, going up to three being the most dramatic and therefore probably the most intense and necessarily expensive. Massive changes we could make but depending on what I’ve been given as my design brief by the client, I am curious about how little we can do to change the kitchen I’m happy to give employment to contractors and suppliers, but I do not exist to further the kitchen renovation industrial complex, and neither should my clients.
40:17
So I want to talk about some of the strategies I’ve used on a few recent projects. I’m going to describe their initial layout, and then what we proposed in order to improve upon, upgrade, update, without completely scraping those spaces. I’m not going to tell you that mid-century houses should never be touched, that they don’t need remodels. And I’m not just saying that as you know, an architect who specializes in remodels, houses do need changes over time.
40:46
There are going to be things that come up that are physically broken and need repair or replacement, and there are going to be layouts or ideas in the house that just don’t work anymore or work for your lifestyle. And in a lot of cases, in a tragic number of cases that I personally see people who bring their homes to me for assistance, the damage has already been done. Someone has already come in and set the wheels in motion by making a bunch of choices in the past for the house that are already out of character for the home. So now you’ve got to put something back together.
41:19
There are two general principles that I want to emphasize here, not so much tips or tricks, but just things to hold that underpin making good choices for your home, long lasting choices. And so the first one is going to be to just step away from the madness that is the kitchen renovation industrial complex to make changes that are at core, important to you and correct for the house, not changes that are dictated by the fast fashion and trend focused nature of this industry. The way that there is a focus on kitchen trends, the way that if you put in Google search terms related to kitchen renovation, you’re immediately going to see a dozen listicles talking about the trendiest things, or what you must have in your kitchen renovation in 2025 next year, 2026 year after that, 2027 over and over and over again, is that that’s part of the way that we keep the Kitchen Remodeling industrial complex fueled.
42:20
It is keeping people demolishing and rebuilding their kitchen every five years, over and over again. So the shortest, clearest, safest way to steer clear of all of that is to just make sure that every choice you make for your home is both personal to you and specific to this house. If that’s your decision making paradigm, you are pretty well protected from the vagaries of current trends.
42:44
Now it’s actually impossible, I think, to live in the world, to see media, to see your friends’ homes, to see television shows and not be somewhat influenced by what is currently trendy. And there will always be a little bit of whatever is uppermost in the fashion of home remodeling that seeps into your consciousness and feels like a good idea to you and also is just available as you’re looking for materials or shapes or services.
43:13
But the more that you can focus on what’s right for the house and what you personally like, and the more that you can interrogate what it is that you really like, and not just what you like, because you’ve seen a lot of it recently, you’re better off. You’ll be this is a bit like, oh, you know, if we’re comparing kitchen fast fashion to fashion, fast fashion, this is a bit like the cycle of jeans. Every woman out there knows this.
43:37
The way that the fashion and jeans goes is as soon as you actually get used to whatever is in right now, the right you know, the waistline that’s in fashion, the slimness that’s in fashion, the opening at the shoe that’s in fashion, it’s going to change. So it’s like a Ferris wheel cycle, always coming up, always going down, from high waisted to hip huggers, from skinny jeans to flared and that means that your favorite pair of jeans, the one you finally got used to, the ones that fit and flatter you and feel comfortable to wear, are probably gonna go out of style before you actually wear them through.
44:10
And then, if you’re anything like me, you’ll hang on to them getting musty in a drawer, frustrated for just enough years that they are completely at the far end of the style, and then give up and toss them into the goodwill bag just before they come back in. But this is so much more important than a pair of jeans in a bag for Goodwill, because when you are making choices for your home, removing them is not as easy as taking off a pair of pants and putting on another one. It means hiring demolition experts. It means a dumpster. It means the landfill for choices that are made on current trends.
44:43
So step one, make choices for the house that are not based on current trends, and in the specific This means, do not choose the subway tile backsplash and Shaker Cabinet doors that are already falling behind the times now but are still being prominently displayed in cabinet company showrooms. Yes.
45:01
And then part two, the other thing you can do to push back in the fight, to resist the kitchen renovation industrial complex, is to preserve whatever you can. Let’s call this the bonus points, the silver lining, or maybe the underpinning, the fundamental why can be to save you money, to keep valuable resources and the labor and materials and effort the work of someone else’s livelihood out of landfills. So keep as much of what exists as you can. And here I’m going to pick on builders a little bit.
45:36
I try not to get into arm wrestling matches with the mindset of a contractor, but I do want to warn you of a fundamental difference in perspective. My perspective is that I would like to maintain anything that is mid-century, original, and really anything that is functional in your house as much as I can. And many homeowners that I work with share this perspective.
45:59
You may very well share this perspective that you’re not looking to throw away anything in the house that already works. You’re very likely, though, to run into the opposite attitude when you start speaking to builders, to general contractors, and they are going to want to start over from scratch for any number of reasons, including, but not limited to they might want to do more work, which will increase their bottom line. They might want to keep every one of their trades people involved in the process, so that their sort of step one, step two, step three system is followed. They might want to just make their process more straightforward and efficient by having the greatest control over the project, so that they can, you know, source from their cabinet shop, have it assembled at a factory and brought to site, rather than doing the fussy work of fitting in with things that already exist.
46:49
They may also want to have the greatest control over the project, so that they can confidently cover it under their warranty. And they also might just have a certain tidy mindness around liking to start projects from scratch. So the average general contractor who’s approaching a kitchen remodel is going to recommend you rip out everything, every part of whatever room you’re talking about, down to the studs and start from scratch like I say, there are practical reasons for this right, knowing that their warranty is covered, knowing that they’re going to be able to meet inspection for all of the pieces.
47:24
For example, if you’re taking on a mid-century kitchen update, the odds are that both the plumbing and the electrical work is pretty different from what we would use today. The plumbing is probably iron work rather than PVC, and the electrical work is running through BX tubing, both of which are not the way we do it today, will seem unfamiliar to young trades people educated on modern systems and also, in some cases, not eligible for modern code. It’s not that BX electrical wiring can’t meet modern code, but a mid-century kitchen does not have the number of electrical outlets or circuits wired to meet modern building code, which means you’re going to need going to need to make changes to meet your you know, requirements of your local building municipality, the inspector will require this.
48:09
as I’ve said before, there’s further benefits. If you get down to the studs in your house, you can strip away the inner surface, the drywall or plaster. You have the opportunity to add insulation and to check for moisture or insect damage, and generally, to give the entire system a tune up, I can see many reasons why it’s nice to start from scratch, and most contractors will always suggest that you do so. But I think it’s worth it to weigh this against the many reasons not to strip everything out, toss it in a dumpster in the driveway and start from scratch.
48:39
So this comes back to the pushback on the renovation industrial part of the kitchen renovation industrial complex don’t change what does not need to change. And I can actually think of two kitchens that we recently master planned designs for side by side, just because they were up at the same time, one of which was an astonishingly charming time capsule with an incredible quality of built ins, both in the kitchen and throughout the house that was in the process of being passed down from a delightful woman who lived to literally 100 in that house, and now it’s going to be her daughter and son in law’s home.
49:15
We are making some changes to that kitchen, because while it is in great shape, it’s relatively closed off in the classic mid-century fashion, and that has never suited in any point in its lifetime the way that this extended family host large gatherings in the house, and they tend towards that problem of everyone jammed into the closed off kitchen, and there are particularly traffic jams at the pinch points in circulation.
49:38
So we will be making some changes to this kitchen as it moves forward into the next generation. Next Generation. We’ll be removing some built ins, the 1950s office desk, the little home office kitchen lady desk, for example, will probably be removed no matter what. And some part of the wall that separates the kitchen and the dining room is probably going to come out. I don’t know which of the design scenarios we proposed they’re going to choose.
50:01
But we did explore removing the little peninsula that separates the kitchen from the cooking, cooking area from the dining area. And we also proposed opening up the space in another way that preserved that Peninsula and then added in a little island, which actually, again, I’ve talked about this many times in the past, but ironically, if you have even as much as a seven foot gap across a U shaped Island, a U shaped kitchen design with, you know, kitchen against three walls or two walls in a peninsula, if you put a small butcher block, piece of furniture into the center of that, it can actually help make the space work better, even as people move around it, because they will always go one way or another around the island rather than crossing the middle of the space, sometimes backing and turning into the middle of the space and causing potentially hazardous, hot spills or just inconvenience.
50:53
So one of our solutions is remove the peninsula. One of them is add in a small island. Several of them improve and expand the openings that let you get into and out of the kitchen. But in any case, we are going to preserve the bulk of the built in of the L primary kitchen cabinetry, the wall that contains the wall oven and the refrigerator and the wall that contains the sink and the range and the dishwasher.
51:22
Frankly, I would have been hard pressed to take on this project if the initial design brief had been Let’s tear this all out, dumpster it, and start from scratch. It is just too dear and in amazing shape, it would have broken my heart. And while there are some projects where we propose, for one or two schemes, keeping the cabinets, and in the third we go big, and we propose taking them all out in this house, I was delighted that the owners came to me with a request to preserve some of those original kitchen built ins, no matter what. I’m totally on the same page with them.
51:55
So all of our proposals involve various methods of removing or adjusting some of those built ins, and then assuming that we could salvage some of the door and drawer fronts, possibly from the pieces we were removing, and relocate them to other places in the kitchen as we extended built ins, or find someone, it will be possible, I think, to find a custom cabinet builder who can match what is going on in the existing built ins with new pieces. That may not necessarily be a perfect blend, but will complement, rather than contrast what’s there.
52:27
On the other hand, the other kitchen I’m thinking of that we were designing almost simultaneously had a slightly less charming setup of original built ins, a dark stain and a slightly fussy door design that doesn’t really appeal to the new homeowner their preference within the larger mid-century umbrella is a more Scandinavian modern minimalism with a lighter wood grain. But that’s okay, because the built ins appear to be in solid shape, and in this particular kitchen, it’s quite spacious. So we’re lucky to have that generous layout, which benefits from an additive approach, rather than a subtractive one for design, I often make an attempt no matter what we do, even if we’re building new cabinets from scratch to leave the sink in place and in the kitchen remodel, this saves a little bit of a hassle in plumbing.
53:14
It also often preserves a good spot with a view out a window so we’re not cutting new holes into the house to get a new, better view spot, and in this case, even the hook up for the range and the refrigerator were perfectly functional locations. So we were able to leave the existing core L of cabinets surrounding the range, surrounding the refrigerator and with the sink placement and dishwasher completely intact, and simply add in more functional pantry storage, an island in one design, two islands, although I think we’re going to go with one, a built in banquette for dining in around them, So we can preserve the original, sturdy cabinet boxes they don’t need to end up in the landfill while we remove some of the unnecessary upper cabinets to make more visible space and also the debatably functional drop soffit that’s over them.
54:06
If we put in new door and drawer fonts that are set up to match in the existing units, and then match the design of those into the new bonus storage, mudroom storage, built ins and islands that are all going to be in the same general vicinity, the result will be unified and stylistically coherent, but it will also cost a little less and generate much less demolition waste and require less new materials and just generally resist the necessity of tearing out what exists and starting from scratch. Generally speaking, this all falls under the hatting of, be on guard for the influence of the kitchen renovation industrial complex.
54:47
And it’s kind of self-fulfilling prophecy of; Let’s tear it out and start new. Oh, now what we put in new feels old. Let’s tear that out and start new. This is. Just reminding yourself, frankly, is more important than any tip or trick, reminding yourself that the best meaning the best intended advice that you’re going to get out there from someone who has not done a lot of soul searching about the industry that they belong to is going to be influenced by this sense of tear it out and start fresh. And so whenever you hear that advice, whenever the advice is more transformative than it is tactical, when it is more about making a change than it is about making an improvement. Question it. Push back on it.
55:34
Ask yourself if this is what you want to spend your hard earned dollars on and ask yourself if this is really going to have the longevity to stick around in the house for as long as you’d like to live there. Because while I know some people who find the process of refreshing, I guess let’s use that term politely, the design of their home, over and over again, I would argue that really your goal when making changes to something as structural as the architecture of your house, not necessarily the furniture or the color or the finishes, but the structure of your house, the built ins, the walls, the arrangement, your goal should be to tune it to match your predicted future life in the home, not to just change it for the sake of change.
56:26
Again, you know, I think people can find joy in whatever gives them joy. And I also am absolutely familiar with people whose personality types encourage them to sort of cycle through preferences, styles, tastes, if you get a lift out of picking out new what have you every now and then, changing the paint color on your walls, changing up the soft furnishing your houses, there are ways to constantly cycle new ideas and images and esthetics into your home without needing to generate a whole lot of unreusable landfill material.
57:02
So this is kind of comes back to one of my fundamental sustainability oriented principles for mid-century remodels, for all remodels, which is to put your most you might change your mind about this decisions onto your most easily changed items. So for example, if you are thinking about going in on a color in tile for a bathroom, for example, and you know in your own heart that you’re the kind of person who goes through cycles in your life of colors you like, like you had a whole jewel tones phase at one point, and then you liked more soft, mossy greens and browns, and then you’ve gotten into a lavender phase.
57:43
I am picking on my own mother right here, right now. By the way, these are all color tones she’s gone through in her clothing over time. And salute to her. And I love it. I also have slowly cycled through various color phases, where I wore a lot of black and navy, and then I wore a lot of black and gray, and then I wore a lot of black and brown, and then I wore a lot of are you getting the trend here? The point is, so salute to my mother. She has rarely, if ever, put those color choices into the permanent features of her home, but she’s often painted them, and she’s more likely to wear clothing that isn’t the color range that she likes the most, and think about the house as a slightly separate item from her, because a house has a longer lifespan than an item of clothing in almost all cases.
58:26
I don’t know we could if anyone out here is like a vintage clothing person and wants to argue with me that like a wool sweater made in 1950 is well cared for and just as long lasting as a two by four. I mean, yeah, make, make your pitch. But my point is so for example, if you’re sorry to go back, I have digressed.
58:45
If you are the kind of person who, every five years, you get a new favorite color scheme, I would urge you not to choose that for the tile in your bathrooms and kitchen. I would do something more neutral or choose something you feel a little less married to, that’s a little more connected to the air of the house. Pick one of the mid-century colorways that is good enough for you, and maybe one that complements colors in paint and soft furnishings that you like, you could do.
59:11
I mean, there are there are blandish, there are white and beige, yellow, pink, blue, what have you, colorways for tiles and fixtures in a mid-century bathroom, and then you can come back in and do a fun contrasting wallpaper and towels and rugs on the floor or paint that you can change up in a DIY project or a shopping expedition whenever you want to. Anyway, we are constantly being influenced by media, by advertising, and by our own experiences in life, to see something that’s cool somewhere else, and want to acquire that and sort of tack it into our own life experience.
59:51
And I think that that can be a wonderful thing to do, as long as it is additive, as long as is in line. In with the character of your life and your house. So what I would just recommend out of all of this is think long term and think specifically, because ultimately, what’s fashionable, what’s being pushed today by the kitchen renovation industrial complex, has very little to do with your personal taste or ability to relax and enjoy your life and your house, and much more to do with motivating you to go out and buy something new and get rid of something old, when you could just stick with the same thing that’s been there all along, just like the story I told in the introduction, what’s old is new again, and I think mid-century is arguably truly timeless.
1:00:39
I would also argue mid-century is my favorite personal style. It’s the style I love the most. But I would also appreciate seeing craftsman kitchen details in a craftsman house, and maybe not Victorian kitchen elements in a Victorian house, we do start to lose track of the timeliness of a lifestyle as well as a house, which is one of the reasons that mid-century houses get renovated.
1:01:02
But you’re never going to go wrong when you’re reaching back to the original era of your house for at least some of the material palette choices. That’s always the right place to start. And then tuning it to fit your life and your personal tastes is perfectly right as well. But not being influenced by what’s uppermost on HDV right now that’s really important.
1:01:26
So with that, I will just encourage you to continue to make excellent choices for your mid-century home, your mid-century home, which has been ticking along, being charming and livable and quite easy to care for and the right size and located in a neighborhood you like for 70 plus years now and has plenty of potential to keep on doing that for 70 more years.
1:01:50
So as you make adjustments to it, to fit it to your life and to fit it up for the future, let’s keep that long term focus in mind and push back on any short term drive towards what’s new right now, kitchen trends you should follow in 2025 All right, so if you want to grab a link to the transcript, if you want to see anything I’ve referenced here, if you want to pop over to my Instagram page to see some of the photos from the amazing house tour with that absolutely timeless kitchen you’ll find everything you want to at mid mod midwest.com/ 2207 for today’s episode.
1:02:32
And I absolutely encourage you to go right now, if you have not already, and sign yourself up for the upcoming master class where I will walk you through more than just what to do to avoid HGTV trends, but more how to plan a remodel that is timeless and truly tailored to the life you want to lead, if you enjoy this episode, and if you’re looking for some more encouragement some people who have the same mindset as you that it’s better to think about what’s mid-century about your house than to try to fit it for matching the new build that just went in down the block.
1:03:05
Then let me tell you that you are 100% right to love your mid-century home and help you avoid all the biggest mistakes that homeowners are making on their remodels right now that result in renovations that cost more, take longer, and do not end up feeling totally satisfied, satisfying when you are done. So I’ll walk you through the five step process for planning a remodel that you can lead with confidence, that you can stay in the driver’s seat, one that will turn the house you have into a home that you will love anyway.
1:03:34
That will be happening one week from Saturday, yeah, one week from Saturday at the time of this podcast airing that will be at 11am Central, not too early for those pacific time folks. I hope on Saturday the 27th I really hope to see you there. And in advance of that, if you’ve got longer questions, I will have a Q and A at the end of the workshop that I will try to cover as much as I can.
1:03:58
But if you want a little bit more of my time and attention, if you want to send in some pictures of your home and get me to focus on it the way that I do for my ready to remodel students during an architect Office Hours call come to the live public architect Office Hours call that I’m holding on Monday. I think this is going to be a really fun one. It’s a great opportunity. I love doing this for my own students, and I’d love to get your question maybe with a couple of pictures of your house submitted, so I can glance through them in advance and really get you some detailed advice on best choices to make for your house.
1:04:31
So you can sign up for that. The link in the show notes as well. This office hours call is going to be really fun. It’s free, and it will be at 6pm Central on Monday evening. So get your name on that list. Ask the questions that have been on your mind, and let’s get you moving forward on great choices that are more about you and less about the kitchen renovation industrial complex, huh?
1:04:58
All right, see you for all. All of that in the next week and more next week here on the mid mod remodel podcast.