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Get Those Good Master Plan Vibes

22 min readHow can a master plan help you feel ready to remodel?

A Master Plan means you have, well…a plan. It helps you have the right master plan vibes to move your remodel forward.

Too many people trip on the fallacy that they have to choose a perfect planning process or just “skip” right to the building part. There’s a middle ground.

Any time you spend on Mid-Century Master Plan thinking will set you up for more success. And a master plan doesn’t have to be a perfect object to be successful. In fact … perfectionism might be the problem.

Let’s talk for a minute about what a master plan is NOT.

What your Master Plan is not

It is not detailed blueprints of your remodel. And it isn’t a specification list of every product you’ll use (with a price, source and link). It is not a rigid vision of exactly how you want the house to turn out that doesn’t allow for any real world input.

Really, the best master plans are flexible. They are guides to help point you in the right direction. They are a broad vision of how the house can be altered to improve it … with room for input from the team that helps make that happen.

So let’s focus on how you want to FEEL at the end of your long (or short) mid-century master plan process

Those good Master Plan Vibes

You want to feel confident 

  • Clear on your vision and priorities
  • Aware of your time and budget constraints
  • Knowledgeable (as possible) about your house

You want to feel communicative

  • Ready to lay out the problems you want to solve most
  • To share openly and honestly what your range of possibilities are
  • Willing to be a little vulnerable in order to get help for faster ideas

You want to feel nimble

  • Ready to ask for advice on solutions (without feeling out of control)
  • Ready to take in suggestions, and evaluate them quickly
  • Able to address how real world considerations (cost, regulations, structure) affect your dreams
    • This may be the first time your’e interfacing with a construction pro
    • Be prepared for good ideas and a little “bad news”

More time is better, but some is better than none

Now, if you have time for more detailed planning … YOU KNOW I recommend that.  I’d like you to take your TIME with the Master Plan process.  Go through it, then circle back again … and again as many times as necessary to really answer all of your own questions.  But a little is better than none.

And your mid-century master plan is not about perfection.  It’s about confidence.  Clear communication and Can do – ready to react attitude.  

Quick Design tip for your…oh-hum room

Sometimes, the simplest upgrades make the biggest impact. This week’s tip? A “quick room recipe”: three easy pieces—a standout furniture piece, a pop of color, and a statement mid-century decor item.

Think atomic clock, vintage alarm, or bold accent color. These small choices can give a room fresh energy without a full-scale remodel.

Mid Mod House Feature of the Week

Floating Deck

This week we’re celebrating the iconic “floating deck” of mid-century homes. These horizontal gems, often supported by structural joists running right from the house, give homes a beautiful, seamless indoor-outdoor feel. If you’re lucky enough to have one, a floating deck can be a stunning feature worth preserving (with some modern maintenance tips in mind).

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Read the Full Episode Transcript

Della Hansmann 

Hey there. Welcome back to mid mod remodel. This is the show about updating MCM homes, helping you match a mid-century home to your modern life. I’m your host, Della Hansmann, architect and mid-century ranch enthusiast, and you’re listening to Episode 1905.

Della Hansmann 

Now, we have just launched our late fall mid mod remod squad. First call on Monday, next call a week from next Monday, you’re still welcome to join us inside of ready to remodel at any time, of course, and you can always check out that free master class recording by dropping by midmod-midwest.com and choosing learn with us from the main menu.

Della Hansmann 

Here’s something I share in that class that really always sticks with me, because it’s so sad that most people in America jump right into a remodel without any sort of vision or plan or planning time. Unfortunately, this always results in a non-zero amount of remodeler’s regret when the work is done. You’re going to regret some part of the process because you didn’t think it all the way through, and it’s usually a slower overall process, too.

Della Hansmann 

Counter intuitively, taking a little bit of time at the start and to know why you want to do it helps you move faster and communicate more clearly to your team. I hear from so many people who think design is a good idea, but they just don’t have enough time for it.

Della Hansmann 

They don’t have enough time to devote to a deep dive into the master plan method, or they don’t have the resources to work with made by Midwest. If this is you. If it is, here’s the really good news. It’s not an either or proposition.

Della Hansmann 

You don’t have to pick all the planning or no planning, because you can get so much benefit from a master plan, even if you only take time to tap each step in the process briefly. For people like you who might be feeling too crunched for hours or for days, weeks or months, until a remodel kicks off. I’ve made you your own resource, the master plan in a month program.

Della Hansmann 

Master Plan in a month condenses the Master Plan method into the minimum viable steps, the literal least you should do before paying someone to make a change to your house or before you start to swing a pry bar around. Actually, pro tip, don’t swing a pry bar around. Someone will get hurt.

Della Hansmann 

But do take just a little bit of time, a month or a weekend, if you really want to focus and condense it to run through the Master Plan method. I’ll tell you why in the moment, first, I want to share your design tip of the week. And yes, I did choose it because it’s meant specifically for people who want to make a change and don’t have a lot of time to make that change happen.

Della Hansmann 

And here’s our mid-century tip. Look, sometimes you need to make a change fast. You don’t even necessarily need to remodel anything. You just need to see progress. So you can do this by adding a few more mid-century elements to a space you already have, and then take a breath. You’ve made it better. It does help to have a couple of items working together. Just buy one thing isn’t usually enough.

Della Hansmann 

Here’s the quick room recipe I like to use. Pick a piece of furniture, a colorful thing, and then an authentic mid-century object to draw your eye and be a conversation piece that might be a coffee table, a rug and an atomic clock, or a bedside table or two, a throw and a vintage alarm, a bench for the entry, an accent wall paint color and a fun shaped mirror. The list goes on.

Della Hansmann 

So let’s focus on one thing you could buy to pull that whole room together. And let’s start with the atomic wall clock. This is kind of the must have item of vintage hunters. They can sometimes be quite expensive, but they are worth keeping your eye out for in vintage stores, particularly in like an antique mall that doesn’t necessarily specialize in mid-century stuff. That’s always gonna be your best place to find something really cool and weird for way less than you would get it online.

Della Hansmann 

If you start curating your search towards Etsy stores, people who know what they’re selling are going to sell you something, and that could be great, but they are going to add to the price tag because they know the value of what they’ve got. So if you are looking for this, remember, it’s an object to look at. It does not necessarily have to work. If it’s a plug in clock, you are not required to plug it in if it is nonfunctional. I mean, kind of who cares.

Della Hansmann 

You can tell the time on your phone, but a true atomic Starburst clock, something that’s just going to show out its sun rays. Have fun, metal pieces, maybe some gorgeous walnut that’s the sort of thing that you will build a whole room around. And you can start by using the room recipe.

Della Hansmann 

Remember, remodeling is slow, but changing up your house doesn’t have to be if you add three new or new to you pieces to your room, you could shift the entire vibe and then keep going. The best part is that choices like this can inspire you to go further later, or they can be rolled into your future changes. So if you take on a bigger remodel, you’re not doing anything now with this move that you can’t carry with you into the final remodeled house. If you want a handy guide to that, Quick Start mid mod room recipe system, grab it at mid mod midwest.com/roomrecipe.

Della Hansmann 

As always, you’ll find show notes with that and the links to the references I’m going to make and pictures of our mid-century design feed and a transcript of this conversation on my website at mid mod midwest.com/1905. That’s your show notes page link.

Della Hansmann 

All right, let’s talk about what you really get out of having a master plan. And it’s not necessarily having every single detail picked out perfectly. That’s not actually the goal, in fact, that’s explicitly not what it is. It’s not a detail construction Level Blueprint, and it’s not a specification sheet that lists the product link and source and price for every single item that will come up in the house.

Della Hansmann 

Instead, it’s intentionally much more flexible than that. I actually think that while in a case where time is no object and also money is no object, it’s lovely to be able to flesh out the entire vision from a project in perfect detail like that. That’s the way I was trained to work in architecture, in residential architecture, and it’s the way I did work for a number of years.

Della Hansmann 

When I worked in high end residential remodels in Chicago, we would previsualize literally every detail, every handle, every faucet, every fastener, specify, every material, every part of the project was previsualized down to the quarter or eighth of an inch. And when we would work with subcontractors and contractors and cabinet shops, they would all be submitting back to us very detailed documentation of their plans, which we would then review in detail and approve.

Della Hansmann 

That’s all perfect again, if time and money are no object. But we literally just started this episode by talking about the fact that you might have time to even go through my nice little Master Plan method. And the master plan method is meant to be the essentialized version of what you should know about your home before you start changing it. What you should know about your vision for your home before you start changing it.

Della Hansmann 

So we are nowhere close to that perfectionistic vision of every detail predicted, every i dotted, every T crossed. And that concept, though, holds a lot of people back from doing any planning at all. Again, they have a very black and white perspective, and you might fall into this trap yourself, a feeling like, if you can’t know everything about how your remodel is going to go, you don’t have time to plan, and you should just find an expert who knows how to remodel things.

Della Hansmann 

Someone who you like some of the pictures in their book. Point at the picture in their I’ve done this project before book and say, okay, that go, but there is so much room in between those two places of knowing every single thing and just closing your eyes and throwing a dart that I really want to emphasize the thing you get from a master plan vibes. Even more than specificity is good vibes.

Della Hansmann 

That sounds so big, but I let me clarify that more what you actually want to have are three qualities in yourself that you feel ready, that you feel ready to remodel. You want to feel confident about your vision, your priorities, aware of your time and budget constraints, and knowledgeable as much as possible about the house. And you want to feel communicative.

Della Hansmann 

You want to feel ready to lay out the problems you want to solve most, to share openly and clearly what the range of your possibilities, your acceptable range is with the people you’re going to work with, and willing to be a little vulnerable in order to get help faster as you work with people and you want to feel nimble flexible, ready to ask for advice on solutions without feeling Out of control.

Della Hansmann 

Ready to take in suggestions and evaluate them quickly. Able to address how real world considerations like cost regulations and structure will affect your dream, your plan, and ready to sort of take in the good news, the bad news, and move forward. Now, if you have time to do more, to do more detailed planning, to go deeper, you know, I recommend that, but if you don’t, I want you to remember that it’s not about perfection.

Della Hansmann 

It is about confidence, clear communication and a flexible, nimble approach to being able to deal with things as they go forward. So I’m going to talk about each of those points a little bit more deeply so you can really get the sense of why Master Plan thinking is going to get you to that particular effect? You want to feel confident. Well, first, why do you want to feel confident? I mean, I assume you just do.

Della Hansmann 

Do you not like being confident? Everyone, everyone wants this, right? But specifically, you need to feel confident in your remodel process. And to be perfectly honest, you’re very likely to feel a lack of confidence as you go into a remodel because remodels are expensive. They’re usually a first or second time you’ve ever done it in your lifetime. Experience.

Della Hansmann 

Most people, the average American, does not remodel house after house after house. Most people I work with are planning a remodel for the first time. Have never made a change to their home. This might be their first home. Have never worked with a designer or a contractor before. So of course, that’s going to make you feel a little rocky, and if you do not feel confident, that puts you at risk of being knocked off your goals, your priorities.

Della Hansmann 

Well, You want to do this in the first place, so I want you to feel like you are driving the bus. You are calling the shots. You are the leader of this project, even if you’re not the person who’s doing the physical labor, even if you’re not the person who is the quote, unquote expert on what’s going to happen.

Della Hansmann 

And when you don’t know every detail of the line item of the budget, you don’t know every detail of the building code that is governing what’s going to happen in your house, but still, it’s your house, and you know why you wanted to change it and what you’re hoping to change it into when you feel aware of some of the realities, again, not every single detail of the building code, not every single line item in the budget, but aware of what is realistic, what is possible.

Della Hansmann 

When you’ve had conversations with people and been given practical ranges of answers, on cost, on timing, you can start to feel like you will be less surprised by news that’s coming, and therefore are able to respond to it. And when you feel like you are even a little bit knowledgeable about your own home, you’ll be able to take in new information. You’ll be able to go ask people to tell you more in a more balanced way than if you feel like you don’t really know anything about your house at all, and everybody that walks into it seems to know it better than you.

Della Hansmann 

Let me just tell you, for the fact, as an architect who is an expert in other people’s houses, that is not true. I do not know my clients’ homes better than they do. They know their homes, and they tell me what’s important to them about their house. They tell me the back story and how they met someone who used to live there 20 years ago, who explained to them why this was done.

Della Hansmann 

Now I may walk in the door and point out a detail they literally never noticed before, or suggest a reason for why a particular mid-century construction detail was used that might be news to them, but that doesn’t mean I know the house better than they do, and I’m just adding to their personal expertise in their own home when I have conversations like that, the bottom line is that first goal of master plan vibes for you to feel confident is going to allow you to take a leadership role.

Della Hansmann 

It’s going to allow you to take in and assimilate information as you get it, and it’s going to allow you to stick to what’s most important, so that you can focus when something becomes more expensive. You can decide whether you want to rule it in or out when something becomes when an opportunity arises. You break through a wall and you realize, oh, it would be really easy to put a window here.

Della Hansmann 

Do you want one? You can instantly decide, or rapidly decide, yes, you want to take advantage of that opportunity. When you come across a piece of vintage furniture or an appliance or a fixture that’s going to work well in the house, you can jump at the prospect, because you know how it’s going to fit into your budget. You know how it’s going to fit into the dimensions of the house, and you’re ready to just say yes to things.

Della Hansmann 

Confidence leads us. It goes hand in hand with that second effect of a master plan, which is to feel communicative. When you’re confident, it’s easier to communicate, but you also want to have the tools at your disposal to communicate and a master plan process is meant to lead you to having even a rough pencil sketch of the floor plan, even a cursory bullet list of the areas you want to touch, even a simple collection, a minimalist Pinterest board that’s going to show you some examples that you can share With someone of exactly what you mean when you say slab cabinet, so that they’re not going to give you a Shaker Cabinet.

Della Hansmann 

When you’re able to be communicative, you can show someone exactly what you’re talking about and honestly be a little honest with them. You can talk about what is real, range of possibilities. I know a lot of people hesitate to talk about dollars with even with me, a designer who does not base the cost of my services on the cost of the work that will be done in the remodel.

Della Hansmann 

But specifically, when people talk to a contractor, they’re afraid to say, we have $100,000 to spend here, that’s our hard limit, or we would like to spend $100,000 and we are wondering if it’s going to cost that, or to say we would like to spend $100,000 and we have 150

Della Hansmann 

Do we have to spend that? People really feel like they are giving away the farm that it’s a bad negotiating tactic, and I’m sure that there are some bad actors out there who would take that information and use it against them. I hope that you’ll be able to suss out who those people are through the rest of your interactions with them, and not work with those people in the first place.

Della Hansmann 

But ideally, you’re forming a relationship with a contractor, or with several contractors if you’re self-managing a project, where they are going to openly and honestly tell you what you’re asking for will cost, and you’re going to assess if that fits into your budget, and you’re going to tell them what you have to bring to the table. Ask them if they have other information about pricing, loans, remodeling sort of financial structures. There are companies that can give you a zero interest loan for a year on the project because they have a relationship with a bank that gives them such a deal.

Della Hansmann 

So when you can talk about strategically, what you’ve got in your budget, what you want to get done and then how to make that happen, you’re going to get the best feedback from the people you’re working with, and they can tell you, Look, there’s no way to get a good bathroom and kitchen remodel done for your price tag. So probably you want to choose one or the other.

Della Hansmann 

Or they can tell you, yeah, you can do all of that for the dollar value you were hoping for, but you probably can’t choose our highest range of finishes. Is that going to be a problem? It might not. Because honestly, you’re not always looking for the highest end finishes when a mid-century remodeled, which we’ve talked remodeled, which we’ve talked about before. But being willing to be a little vulnerable with your budget and to be a little vulnerable with I’m open to suggestions.

Della Hansmann 

Here’s what I would like to achieve. Do you see a better way to get this done is sometimes the best way to get excellent advice from a designer like myself, from Creative contractors who’ve had experience working in homes like yours, to work with someone. Now, the third quality you will get at the end of a well done Master Plan process that again, is not knowing every little detail. It’s not having everything picked out.

Della Hansmann 

In fact, it’s the opposite of having every little detail locked in, is to feel flexible, you’ll be ready, like I said, to ask for advice on solutions without getting out of control, ready to take in suggestions, but also able to make quick substitutions between one material and another, one solution and another. If you’re not fixed on a specific tile from a specific tile company, tile is a hard example, because people do fall in love with tile if you’re not set on a specific light fixture from a specific company, but instead, you know you want a milk glass globe lamp in this particular spot, or that’s going to be your language all the way through.

Della Hansmann 

There are a range of different price points where you can find that object. You might be able to get it from Home Depot. You might be able to get it from Schoolhouse electric. You might be able to get it from West get it from West Elm. There are a number of sources that you can go to, whether they’re going to come in the fastest time range and be available when you need them, whether they’re going to cost, but you want them to cost, whether they’re going to work with the specifics of the contractor.

Della Hansmann 

That is, you know whether they’re the in house supplier of your electrician has that exact product isn’t important when you just need a particular type of metal, a particular type of glass, a particular shape of object. So having a master plan vision, the way you go through the style guide process makes you nimble. It makes you flexible, because you know how you want the outcome to be, but you’re not attached to very specific components of it. You want an overall effect that’s going to work.

Della Hansmann 

So when you have the time to get more detailed, I still want you to hold your style guide a little lightly. I still don’t want you to choose the absolute be all, end all product and be satisfied by nothing else. I want you to think about how you can substitute to go up and down the budget range, how you can choose something that’s available locally so you don’t have to wait for a shipping time from Europe. I want you to be able to feel like you can roll with the punches and make the remodel come together. And this is also going to help you remodel on a faster time scale.

Della Hansmann 

So if you’ve been letting the concept of perfection of knowing everything hold you back from jumping and knowing anything, then I hope, after all the mid modern model episodes you may have taken in this is the one that persuades you that a little is better than none, and you can actually go through the steps of the master plan process effectively by watching my free class and just thinking about each one during the duration of the class as it applies to your house. That’s better than nothing.

Della Hansmann 

Taking some notes in the class and then spending a weekend sort of going through each step with your partner and knocking out some of the disagreements, some of the miscommunications, some of the fuzzy areas in your thinking, asking yourself what matters most to you, asking yourself what you know about the house or should figure out.

Della Hansmann 

Asking yourself what mid-century style is going to mean that’s going to move you closer to confidence, to communication and to being flexible and ready to roll with the project as it changes. And if you want a little bit more hand holding than that, but not something as time intensive or costly as ready to remodel right now. Then I urge you to go check out master plan in a month. I made it for this specific case, for that specific situation, and I really do believe that it is an ideal way to get the most out of your situation.

Della Hansmann 

All right, let’s take a little detour from our main topic and talk about a mid-century house feature that I love. Let’s talk about the floating deck now, since I can’t show you a picture right now, I should clarify. I don’t mean what you might find if you throw a basic Google search in, which is a deck that floats in your yard, as in, it’s not attached to the house.

Della Hansmann 

So, this is a landscape design tool. A floating patio, or a floating deck is a free standing platform somewhere out in your yard that you walk away from the house to get to. Those are cool too, by the way, and a great way to make an outdoor room depending on your particular yard layout. And if you have a beautiful, attractive back side of your house that it would be nice to make a floating deck or patio out in the yard where you can sit and look back and admire the house.

Della Hansmann 

That’s not the mid-century house feature I wanted to describe, though. I’m also not talking about a deck that literally floats. It’s a recurring joke in architecture school that if you sort of create a design that looks pretty on paper but is under baked structurally, and your instructor or a critic who’s in to supervise your work asks you, okay, what makes that stand up? You can sort of squint or grimace and say, Oh, Sky hooks or possibly repulsor beams are pushing it up off the ground. No, that’s not what I’m talking about either.

Della Hansmann 

The mid-century floating deck is actually very structurally sound. Usually it’s because the joists that support the floating deck are the same ones that are supporting the floor of the house. They run continuously right through the outer wall and out to hold up the deck too, as it’s built, it’s a logical and sturdy detail, and it allows the mid-century Builder to create a deck structure that doesn’t need to come down and rest on the ground. It floats off the side of the house, which can be really beautiful.

Della Hansmann 

Sometimes it’s a slender floor plate with only a little bit of railing, and sometimes it’s wrapped like the prow of a ship with the same material as the siding of the house or something. As a contrast, the effect is to create another horizontal datum line that runs across the house. And esthetically, it’s a great detail. Practically, it can also be lovely because it might guard a sort of a Juliet balcony, the kind where you could walk out through sliding doors from a bedroom or a den onto a little platform that doesn’t lead down into the yard, but it gives you a chance to experience fresh air without having to go to the main door of the house.

Della Hansmann 

It gives you a chance to put in a bigger window with a bigger opening area. You could use a sliding door as a window that steps out onto an almost nothing space that’s like a three foot deep floating deck. Unfortunately, there is a downside to this detail, which is that the joists that support the deck run straight through into the house, as I mentioned, and this can create several problems.

Della Hansmann 

One is that there’s no way to have an insulation break. You can’t have a continuous line of insulation that separates inside from outside when there’s structure running straight through from inside to out. And the other one is that if the deck isn’t properly maintained, the wood in the deck structure can start to experience rot, and then that can translate through into the house structure as well.

Della Hansmann 

I was thinking about floating decks recently because there is a set of apartment buildings in Madison that I drive by regularly on my way to visit my sister that sit at the edge of Tenney Park, and they’re finished with a dark brown stained board and batten siding, which gives their two story form what might be a vertical aspect, but then they also had these lovely horizontal floating decks at The second floor that helped give the building a more horizontal line and kind of anchor it and keep it snug and low to the ground.

Della Hansmann 

And last time I drove by, I realized that someone had just cut off all the original decks and replaced them with very standard lumber yard special new decks are just about exactly what you might expect. They are exactly as wide as the sliding doors they sit in front of. They’re supported by four by posts that go down to the ground and have little angle braces. And they stand out from the building like a sore thumb because they’re a much lighter color from the background. So now the building just has these little scabrous, vertical elements grafted onto it. I’m sure they were the most cost effective replacement, I’m sure.

Della Hansmann 

Well, I guess the old decks were probably in poor condition and maybe were unsafe, or maybe the building management just got anxious because they couldn’t understand how the structure worked. But in my opinion, it’s a huge loss, not just from a prettiness point of view, but from a stylistic cohesion level. Those buildings were a mid-century icon, and now they just look like low rent, poor quality apartment buildings. Their historical moment has been broken up to the point that it’s not recognizable. What a shame.

Della Hansmann 

Sorry. I told you a sad story that’s not nice. Let’s turn it around. Do you have a floating deck on your house? They are particularly common on split levels, or as a solution to when the back side of the house that’s a one story ranch on the front, but a walk out to a two story has kind of a cliff wall effect.

Della Hansmann 

A floating deck can help break up that line. Now, a floating deck is a harder thing to add onto your house because it depends on a structural detail that’s kind of baked in. You need those continuous joists running from the house straight out to support the deck. But if you are going to add a deck large or small to the outside of the house, you can give it a little bit of a floating deck esthetic by using the vertical columns that support it on the ground, which is normal and fine, by the way.

Della Hansmann 

But setting them back perhaps a little bit from the outer edge of the deck, so that they fall into the shadow line of the deck, or otherwise finding another way to visually de-emphasize them, to emphasize the horizontal, the deck part, and de-emphasize the vertical, the column support. That might also mean letting them be finished in a different material matching to the siding color, or painting them darker, or staining them darker, so that the lighter color of the deck and the railing stand out.

Della Hansmann 

I’m going to throw some images of a great house. We did a master plan for a little while ago with a beautiful floating front deck, which was just absolutely chef’s kiss, onto the show notes page. So go check it out there, and I’ll put up some other visual examples as well.

Della Hansmann 

And meantime, if you love a floating deck and have one, or wish you had one, or you hate them, if they make you feel like you step out the door and you’re just gonna fall right off the side of the house. I’d love to hear from you, so let me know. Reach out to me on Instagram and tell me what you think about the mid-century floating deck.

Della Hansmann 

That is all for this week, as always, go check out the show notes page. Mid mod, midwest.com/ 1905 to find the transcript, to get a link to the room recipe, to see some pictures of floating decks, and just to think about how you can make better choices for your mid-century home, even if you don’t have a lot of time to make them in and next week, I’m going to be back to talk to you, or possibly to the world, about the idea of what to do to a mid-century house you’re about to sell.

Della Hansmann 

A particular example might be, if you have just become responsible for a parent’s or a grandparent Time Capsule house, what should you do to it? What should you let someone else do to it in order to get it ready to go in the market? I don’t think I’m gonna shock you with what I say next week, but I will have some detailed advice. So tune in next week and find out what it is you.

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