Today, we are going to talk about The Thing™️ that will drive you nearly nuts during your remodel … and the mindset reset you’ll NEED to deal with it well.
I don’t actually know what that thing will be, for you. But that doesn’t matter. In any remodel there will come a point where the entire project feels like it will boil over. I’ve never heard of one where The Thing™️ didn’t come up.
Here’s how it will go for you.
You’ll be running behind your goal schedule.
And then something that is Capital-I-Important-To-You will spin out and suddenly become more expensive and complicated than you planned for.
Your temptation will be to just cut that thing out of the project. Or cheap out on it. Or take the less desirable option.
Like I said, I don’t know what that thing will be. Or the actual cost in time and money to do right by it. But I still, confidently, say that for a remodel you’re happy with after you’re done, you’ll want to resist that temptation. Dig deeper. Go around with the contractor a few more times. Stretch the budget to a solution you can love, not just live with.
Why? Because this is The Thing™️ that matters a lot to you.
So … right now, long BEFORE you get to that moment, let’s talk about the reset you’ll need in order to finish your project strong and love the result.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
See the boil over before it happens
Long story, short, in that potential boil over moment you don’t want to watch the water go over the top of the pot and then have to turn off the gas and snatch everything off the cooktop. You want to be watching for it. You want to see it coming, know it for what it is, and … turn the heat down a bit so you can get back to a simmer.
Recognise The Thing™️ that’s important to you
How will you know when you’ve hit that thing. By feel. By vibes. And by referring yourself back to the Dream stage of your Mid-Century Master Plan -your “why” – and to the Distill stage – your Mid-Century Moment.
Check your feelings. If the source of your frustration and extra time and cost ISN’T ultimately that relevant to your reasons for making a change to your home in the first place OR to the overall great look of your mid-century style, drop it. Use this mid remodel mindset reset to STOP being frustrated about it and stop worrying about it altogether.
But if it is going to fundamentally diminish your homes mid-century truth or detract from the lifestyle goals you had for your remodel, invest!
Adjust your timing and even your budget to make it work
This is the mindset reset.
When you hit a roadblock on something that truly matters, focus more on how much it matters and less on the road block. You may need to pause the project while you brainstorm. You may need to invest a little more of the budget in that solution, spending more or cutting other elements. You may need to just expend more of your life energy on worrying about it, talking about it, researching it, going around again with the contractor about it.
All of that will be worth it for The Thing™️ that really matters.
Choosing to invest more time and energy in that unexpected and super frustrating thing isn’t the Sunk Cost Fallacy in action. It’s remembering your “why.”
And remembering that the energy, time and money that you put into your entire remodel means it would be madness to drop the ball at the last minute on The Thing™️ that really matters to you.
Don’t let yourself slip into “mid” remodel
Every remodel is expensive in terms of both time, energy and dollars. Even the ugly ones. Even the ones that are out of date in 10 years. Even the cheap home depot flips. They may not cost as much up front, sometimes. But when the end up in the landfill 15 years later, or depress you for 20, they DO cost.
Quick design tip for…your front door!
Step one: Go get paint in your favorite color and paint your front door this weekend! Or choose form any of the low impact project to amp up your home’s curb appeal.
Step Two: sign yourself up for the Free CURB APPEAL CLINIC happening at noon central on May 14th! Sponsored by Modern House Numbers, this 30 minute class will give you some great ideas to tune up the MCM on your mid-century era home in a few simple steps!
Mid Mod House Feature of the Week
Kidney Shaped Pool
The very first kidney shaped pool was designed by modernist architect Alvar Aalto for his 1939 Villa Mairea in Noormarkko Finland. and put into a villa created in 1939 in Finland. His out of the box design ended up really kicking off a movement in California via the design of landscape architect Thomas Church creating a home for the Donnell family in Sonoma, California.
That pool ended up on the cover of House Beautiful in 1951 and became an icon. And the kidney shaped pool is still iconically associated with California modernism, with mid-century homes with overwhelm overhanging eaves, with full glass walls with a living room that turns into a patio that goes right out to a kidney shaped pool.
There were probably, per a recent dwell article, 20,000 of them installed per year in the Greater Los Angeles region.
About 60% of all the pools in California are kidney shaped pools, and they also kicked off a skateboarding movement when there was a drought in the 1970s and the state asked homeowners to conserve water by draining their pools. Teens started slipping into people’s backyards and having impromptu skate competitions in those kidney shaped pools. So this a fun piece of cultural history as well as a great icon of mid-century design.
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
I mean this in the least scary and off putting way possible, but I have to tell you, when you take on a remodel, there will come a point when the entire project feels like it has boiled over. You’ll be running behind your goal schedule, and something important to you will spin out and become more expensive and complicated than you could possibly have imagined right now, long before you get to that moment, let’s talk about the mid remodel mindset reset you need in order to finish your project strong and love the result.
Starting from a mid-century master plan is going to help you plan a remodel you’ll love in the end. Yes, but I also want to prepare you for this apparently inevitable moment. So today we’re talking about the mid remodel mindset pivot. Hey there. Welcome back to mid mind 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 2104.
If you’re thinking Della, I do not have a remodel in my near future. I’m going to tune this episode out. Don’t two things. One, if you’re a long way out from your remodel, or if yours is long in the rear view mirror, I give you permission to treat this episode as a little bit of schadenfreude.
But also, I think that a remodel mindset reset is applicable to many aspects of life. In fact, I just found it a really helpful metaphor as I was thinking about this episode and experiencing my recent travels. As I got to the end of the trip, I realized that all the delightful eating out I’ve been doing with my sister, which wasn’t my habit on previous travel experiences, was making London a little pricier than I had planned for it to be. And had a yikes moment mid meal in a lovely restaurant. I could have reacted exactly as I’m about to recommend that you do not gotten frustrated, regretted my choices, retrenched on the last few fun elements of the trip, but that would have been a waste of fun, of energy, of the cost of being there in the first place.
More on that trip, by the way, next week, probably not as a travelog, which would be a little self-indulgent, but because I have so many thoughts to share on the different ways that mid-century housing has manifested itself differently in England than it has here in the US, which is both some fun history nerd stuff and I think has applicability to both how we think about improving our spaces In remodels and advocate for changing our cities in public policy. Going forward, I’ve got some more research to do as I put my thoughts together on that, so that’ll be a later episode like I say, probably next week. What else before we get into our main topic?
Oh, a couple of fun bulletins. First, we will be reprising last year’s fun, free curb appeal clinic in conjunction with modern house numbers this spring. So mark your calendar for the free zoom class on Wednesday, May 14, at one Eastern noon, Central, 10, Pacific. Oh, sorry for skipping Mountain Time 11. Mountain Time. I’ll call it a lunch and learn. But who knows when you exactly eat lunch? So it’s a learn also, who knows exactly what your spring schedule has been?
We are in mid Daffodil season here in my part of Wisconsin right now, and about eight houses on my dog walk circuit have just gotten a big load of landscaping, mulch dropped off in their driveways. You might be running even earlier, already done that work or later in your must start getting outside schedule season, but it’s always a good time to spiff up your front door.
In this free 30 minute clinic, I will walk you through some super easy steps you can take to tune your home’s mid-century exterior up and how to think about updating your home in little projects that it can accumulate into bigger changes that you want. You can sign up for the clinic right now to get the reminder emails and the registration link at mid mod dash midwest.com/mini clinic. That’s mini dash clinic.
What else is new? Taking stock of our scheduler as I’m settling back into the office after my trip, again, more on that later, I see that we are booking out a little further the next household to get onto our master plan design roster will probably start getting our fertile attention in June, and then getting their multiple design schemes back, their mid-century solutions package, in early July.
So if that’s you, you’ll then likely want to take a few weeks to mow over the possibilities we’ve created for you before you get back to us with your choices. And then it’ll be another few weeks for my team and I to blend them into a set of final schematic drawings for you. All told, that’s August, so it’s time to start now. If you want to set the wheels in motion for improvements to your house that could potentially start this fall, and that’s if you’re going to DIY, it’s also a great time to get started on design schemes for a major contractor led remodel that would begin closer to the end of this year or the start of next year, it’s never a bad time to begin.
But if you’ve been thinking about oh next year, oh later this year, certainly later this summer, reach out now, and let’s have a conversation about whether a master plan is the right solution for your house, or how mid my Midwest can help you to plan a great mid. Mod remodel. Speaking of mid mod remodel, I realized as I set the topic for this episode that mid remodel mindset reset was going to be very hard for me to consistently say when I just want to say mid mod remodel mindset mid remodel mindset reset. But that’s a me problem.
So here’s my design tip of the week is, let’s get started on improving your front door. Let’s start with the front door. If you’re eager to do something right away to start improving your curb appeal, then my go to number one tip for loving your house a little more is go paint your front door your favorite color this weekend. Why settle for anything less? Unless caveat, your house has an original, unpainted one front door, a mid-century door in good condition. Don’t, don’t paint that wood. Leave that wood unpainted, let it be what it is, and paint something around it.
But if you already have a painted surface on your front door and it is not your favorite color, Why settle for anything less? If choosing a favorite color is tricky for you, then it’s fine to start with some other project. You might want to start by picking a mailbox color or some other accent element you love and then having your local paint company match that color for you. This can make the decision making process easier, but if you know what your favorite color is, go get some paint out this weekend, and then sign up for the curb appeal clinic to get your next action steps for this spring’s tune up mid mash, midwest.com/mini-clinic Yes, it will be recorded. So if you’re not free on that Wednesday, sign up so that you’ll be sure to get the video replay link in your inbox. I’ll see you there. It’s going to be a really fun one.
And of course, after the live clinic, I will stick around to answer specific questions that everyone who attends it live have about their own home, and you’ll get a chance to reach out to the folks at Modern House members. I think there will also be a giveaway. So more on that next week. Keep your ears open for curb appeal clinic updates. Let’s get into our mid remodel mindset reset topic. It is a truth universally not acknowledged enough, that every remodel will take a little longer and cost a little more than you want.
This is probably something that everyone understands about everyone else’s remodel, but you’re always going to think you’re the exception. You’re always going to think your remodel will happen exactly on schedule. You’ll want it to you want to feel optimistic, and I encourage that a little bit of willful self-blinding is sometimes necessary to dive into a project, but at a certain point, too much optimism can lead to despondency, to pessimism. I talked about this last fall in Episode 1901 in October of 2024 about my sisters remodel specifically.
And how that sort of flipping from everything is going right. I’m masterminding the remodel. I can see everything. I’m sort of spinning all of the plates and feeling like you’re in control of things because you’re on top of things. Can then when the project falls behind, lead to a real fall off in sanity. And what she did to pull herself back together and feel like the remodel was gonna be okay and carry it all through.
Spoiler alert, for her, it was a matter of bringing her kitties home, and she’d been living apart from them for too long and just needed to have cats in the house again, even though the last few things were being taken care of, and it helped her feel better about the entire end of the remodel process. So there is that factor of its dragging out too long, and that can affect your mindset.
But the other aspect of your remodel mindset that you’ll need to reset at some point is something, some probably one specific thing. It might be a lot, but hopefully with a good mid-century master plan in place, it will not be too many things, but there’s still always something that is going to become so much more complicated and complex and expensive and not quite turning out the way you want it, and you have to go around on it and reorder or search out another supplier or test a bunch of different methods.
The way that that thing manifests is different in every project, but that one thing always seems to come up, and the way you handle it is not going to make or break your entire remodel experience, but it is powerful in the way that you reflect back on how the remodel went, how it turned out, and how you feel about everything when all is said and done. So this is why I want to talk about it. It is sure it’s a little bit of bad news.
I’m promising you that something will go wrong towards the end of your remodel, but it’s reality, and I always think that when we are prepared for reality, and when we understand that it’s not just happening to you and it will not just happen to you, but it happens to essentially everyone I have ever talked about the process of the remodel. If. Shepherded through a remodel myself, maybe you’ll feel better, calmer, happier, even while you’re getting stressed and frustrated and like you’ll never get out of the situation. Two things can be true.
So this came up recently on an office hours call. I got a lovely update on how it’s been going for one of our ready to remodel students who has just been flying through the program, making great decisions for her home, left, right and center, but she shared her specific end of project frustration, which in her case was the complexity of she really wanted for her Florida mid-century house a terrazzo floor.
But the house that she found was great in every other regard, and didn’t have one. It had a concrete poured floor. And for a while there, they thought that the exposed concrete floor could be reused. They could just pull up all the old linoleum and carpeting that had been there and get very close to a terrazzo effect by grinding down the floor a little bit. But as it turns out, it was more complicated than that.
Now I’m not going to get super into the weeds of her journey, but let’s rest assured that she, like many of my wonderful ready to remodel students, is a very detail oriented person who really followed through on this, who pondered it and planned for it and communicated clearly with her contractors, and still, due to the vagaries of remodels, discovering things you didn’t expect or want. It went through several rounds of decision making where they had to do exploratory demo, and then, unfortunately, found that what they were hoping for wasn’t there.
They costed out a bunch of expensive resurfacing techniques, and eventually what they’re end up, what they’re going to end up doing is putting down a new layer of concrete with an aggregate in it that they can then grind down and it will look a lot like a light color terrazzo floor that she was hoping for very nice in the end. But the process of figuring this out has been slow, drawn out and frustrating, weeks of delay each time they thought they had solved the problem and then realized that they hadn’t solved it, thought that it was resolved, and they knew what it was going to cost and how they would move on from it and put it out of their minds, and then had to return to it.
It’s been very frustrating now, in a case of perfect, dramatic irony, the ultimate solution that they’ve come up with, putting a new thin layer of concrete down over the existing floors, is only possible because they have ground down the existing floors so much that they actually relieved a little bit of depth to put a new surface down.
They couldn’t have come to this solution that they have now from where they started out of, they would never have chosen this, and it wasn’t actually on the table until they went through a bunch of their research and dead ends and false start processes. This is an almost perfect metaphor for what seems to happen on every single project, the end result of how something that was important to you turns out really well in the end, even though the process of getting there was frustrating and expensive and unpredictable and you couldn’t actually have gotten from A to F or G or Q or whatever it is, directly, you had to go through all of the zigzag steps to get there.
This is how it nearly always turns out. I don’t know what the thing will be for you, but it will almost always be there. Now, as she was telling me this story, I was feeling so much sympathy for all the frustration, the stress, the nights of shortened sleep, the long communications, the frustrations, but at the same time, I already knew the story had a happy ending. She was telling us that she’d gotten through it, she’d found a solution that was going to work.
So the frustration that she was relaying was a memory, but you know, no less real for that, there is a certain you have to go through the process of letting it out, of talking about it with people, of sharing with other people who care about that thing that you care about who get it, why you would spend the time and trouble and energy on it in the first place. It’s all part of the valuable therapy of having a mid mod or Mod Squad other people that get it to generalize from this, the bottom line is that the cost in time and the cost in money has to be factored in with the importance of that thing, whatever that thing is for her, the floors, the fact that when she looked across the floor of the whole house, it’s going to be cohesive, it’s going to be beautiful. It’s going to look the way she wanted it to look pretty much from the start.
She would not have been happy with the entire house if they quit after the first iteration and made the first compromise that was suggested by the contractors as well. We can’t do what you wanted, so we’ll just do this less good thing. It would have cost less in dollars and less in time, but ultimately it would have diminished the shine of the entire project. So the thing that I want to frame in this episode about your mid remodel mindset reset is that I want you to prepare yourself to feel free to spend.
And when you hit this now, I’m not telling you to spend willy nilly like money is no object. I don’t know the budget that you’re working from. I don’t know how complicated or expensive the rock in the road that you’re going to hit will be, but I do know dearly from experience of many other people and my own experiences in remodeling as well, that you will end up regretting it if you don’t allow yourself to explore and accept just a little bit more in dollars and relative energy to the whole project.
It’s a question of scale. I can’t tell you the dollar value that’s worth it and the dollar value that’s not worth it, or the time that it might take without knowing your project, you will be the best person to be the judge of this. But sometimes it’s a little hard to see when you’re in the thick of it, which is why we’re talking about it now. Now some last expensive, hard to track down things aren’t in this category.
For example, if you can’t get your hands on the light fixture you’ve dreamed of, I would not recommend that you stay moved out of the house for a year while you wait to track down the perfect light fixture, because a light fixture can easily be put in after the rest of the remodel is concluded, and you can live for a year in a nearly completed remodel with an inadequate light fixture or an almost as good one, and then track it down and install it later. But for something like flooring, you do want to make a choice that you can live with, that you can love, even if it ends up slowing down the whole project, even if it becomes, relative to itself, double the expense relative to the entire project, it will not be that much bigger of a deal.
And it’s important to think of the satisfaction and the How hard will it be to change this and improve it later of the entire project, when you’re considering whether this thing in front of you, is it the frustration the I need to remodel mindset, reset moment of the entire project, and in that moment when You realize that this thing that you’re frustrated by is going to be really hard to replace in the future, and does really matter to you. That’s when it can be worth it to reach a little further and make sure that it happens.
Okay, so the reason we’re talking about this now, while most of you listening are not in the end stage of a remodel, is that the sooner you hear this advice, the more often you hear this advice, the better, and it will still surprise you. When you get to the moment, you’re going to think you’re the exception. You’re going to think this won’t happen to you. And even when you’re in the middle of the project, you’re going to think it’s been going so well. You haven’t been that stressed out. It probably won’t happen. Oh, how I wish that were true.
But your remodel will be going pretty well. You will be handling things pretty well, and that’s because you have a great master plan. You will have a great master plan, and you’ll be so much better off than all of the people who jump into a remodel without a predesign process. By the middle point of their remodel, they’re not going to be feeling pretty good. They’re already loathing their contractor, they’re already regretting some of the choices they’ve made and can’t move on from they’ve already completely lost the plot of what their goal was, because they never really defined it.
And you are going to be a completely different case with your master plan firmly guiding the project, you can focus and make good decisions for every fork in the road that you come to so you will be feeling pretty good in the middle of your remodel, and you’ll think, I’m great. I’m on track. I’m smooth sailing from here. This isn’t gonna happen to me. All I can say to that is, I have never heard of it. I have never met someone who didn’t have something at the end, where they both hit a roadblock that drove them absolutely of the wall, because it was taking forever. We are two weeks in. We are a million years from done. Why are we not done with a stupid freaking project? Maybe we should just move. Maybe we should just sell the house with a drywall Dustin on the floors and walk away. We could live in an apartment.
It happens. The bad news is that nobody likes it, but the good news is that you will get through it and looking back on it, the frustration and even the cost that you chose to pay will fade, but the satisfaction of that powerful, important to you, choice that you chose to spend the time and money on will last, and you’ll kind of forget the bad part. Now it’s not like childbirth, where part of what helps you forget is the hormones that the body experiences and probably all the sleep deprivation that destroys your ability to make short term memories.
So you can’t remember what a remodel feels like. You will just get past it, and once you’re living in your beautiful, finished house, the stress, no matter how long it took the time of working on it will feel worth it. How do I know it will feel worth it? Well, because when you follow the mid-century Master Plan process, you begin by determining what matters the most to you. Two every step along the way of the master plan process then helps you to workshop how to get what matters to you for something that is relatively close to your desired budget. Unfortunately, no one is ever going to get their dream house for free.
That’s not a realistic comparison of priorities and available dollars I can make, but you’ll find the solutions that are going to get you what matters to you for your available budget and lifestyle, the problem solving that you are working through in the master plan process from dream to discovering the skill of thinking through deeply what matters to your family, what you need to feel good about your home, about your life, what a home should be to you, and then to discovery, to taking a real clear eyed look at what’s going on in the house, so you will get as little as possible sidelined by unexpected maintenance or structure or zoning problems that will come up later in the process, and then setting your style, so you can focus on the look that matters to you.
And of course, as we’ve talked about many times before on the podcast, the mid-century look, particularly if you have elements in the house you can preserve, particularly if you’re sourcing vintage materials as they come available on Facebook marketplace, or if you’re working with plywood and your existing oak floors, and kind of building up from there you can get a great, practical, livable, lovable, playful, mid-century style for less.
And then, of course, on the other hand, sometimes minimalism and simplicity is extremely expensive when you’re looking to put in a whole bunch of built ins in a gorgeous, hand finished walnut. That’s not going to be the cheap option, but you know that that’s what you prioritize, that the look of that, the experience of being in that house, is what matters to you. And in your draft phase, you’ll establish that all of the different options you could solve your problems with the big solutions, the medium solutions, the small size solutions, can all come together and develop into one way to pull the house together that’s going to work best for you based on your priorities within the budget that you have right now.
And that means that you are planning a remodel that will satisfy a remodel, that will feel like a breath of fresh air, a whole new day in the house, the home you’ve always wanted. This is the good news, the pep talk. The silver lining is that when you hit that inevitable end of project, oh shoot, this one thing feels like a total roadblock, everything else you’ve done up to there will be going better, we’ll be more on track, and you can reapply, reset your remodel mindset to what mattered most.
Why did you start dreaming in the first place? What is it about this remodel that is going to make you feel like it was worth it, and then readdress that difficult question from that perspective, that will help you feel better about it as you’re doing it, bite the bullet on more time and expense, or decide that it’s not worth it. This is not the hill you’re gonna die on. You’re gonna let this thing go.
Because even though it would have been nice and even though you maybe got pretty excited about it when it was pitched to you by a contractor or a friend, ultimately, it isn’t a part of the master plan. It isn’t a part of what makes this house your dream home. The worst thing that can happen in a remodel, in my opinion, to any house, no matter what the conditions, is a useless remodel, and by that, I mean one that isn’t thought through in order to lean into the style of the original house and to matter to the people who are going to live in it, a remodel done cheaply with crappy materials, just to make a change a difference with no consideration for the value.
And there are so many bad remodels out there, they always end up damaging the quality of the houses and ultimately lowering their value, plus they still cost time and money and resources someone’s energy, even when they’re done badly and they end up in landfills carrying out the results of a bad remodel. Can be dumpster load and dumpster load and dumpster load. The worst case scenario, of course, is a whole house demolition. That’s my nightmare, and that’s the opposite of what we achieve with a mid-century master plan.
So basically, I just want you to know that this is going to happen. It’s okay that it happens. It happens to everyone. I’ve just had a couple of conversations with clients, which has caused me to want to reiterate this right now we’re going into the process, and I do feel like even though with our business model, with our mid-century Master Plan packages, we often don’t do a lot of construction management, we interface with a few clients in their contractor phase, but this is part of my job as an architect, to give people the real world view on how this is going to go.
Because, contractors, bless them, relatively few of them actually want to sit down at the beginning of their relationship with a client and have this particular conversation to say, Hello, new potential client. There will come a time when you will hate this face. When the phone rings with my number, you will swear but I promise my commitment to you is that I will have done good work for you up until then, and that I will finish the project well.
And you’ll be glad contractors absolutely know that this is also a state that the process will go through, but they don’t necessarily want to say that out loud, and I understand that, so I am saying it for them, for all the contractors out there, even the best contractors in the world, hopefully I can save everyone a little bit of unexpected stress by just letting it be pre expected stress. It will, it will come up.
So the kind of trigger point for a mid remodel mindset reset is going to be it’s going to be significant. It’s not going to be, as I said earlier in the episode, a light fixture you can’t track down, but it might very well be something related to structure. You might realize that you can’t replace an entire wall. You can’t remove an entire wall where you wanted to, or that a projecting beam that you really just wanted an open ceiling, and you thought you could get away without it structurally.
But now you’ve realized, oh no, there is a structural requirement for that beam that exists. So now you might have to make a choice, to pocket that beam, which, in the moment, is a cost you hadn’t expected, requires engineering you hadn’t predicted, and you need to go ahead and pause everything while that structural work takes place, but it’s going to give you the wide open space feeling the interconnection between rooms that really is what you want the most out of the space. That’s worth it.
Sometimes it might be something like an unpredictably rotten under decking material that had seemed good enough on the first look, maybe even past an inspection, but once you get into some exploratory demolition, you realize it’s not in as good shape as you thought, and it needs to be replaced to match the time quality of the rest of the remodel. There’s always a silver lining in these things?
Well, pocketing a beam doesn’t really win you anything, but it will get you the result you’re looking for. If you have to replace a rotten deck, you might be able to think about a new shape. Do you want to build in a bench or an outer angle or a shade trellis? There are elements that you can improve on and might end up being features of the completed house that you never thought you never thought you would get into in the first place, because you hadn’t expected that to be something you needed to deal with.
This may come up around space planning and use planning. I’m pulling from examples for past projects here, so you might find that you have two conflicting desires, a want for a space to feel really open and connected, but also to have necessary sound privacy, to be a functional home office.
I worked with a client to create a glassed in office space as a corner of a larger open plan basement, so they could share the natural light of the walkout wall and the gorgeous wood materials could all be shared, but the sound wouldn’t be and also it allows us to keep an open stairwell to a kitchen right above this comes up around some material choices. Flooring is a key one, and it’s hard.
You can go ahead and replace an engineered floor around existing built ins, etc., but if you’re going to underlay the entire house with something lovely that’s best done in the scale of a big remodel, and it’s hard to fix after the fact, likewise, you might have a goal of using your original brickwork even though it was painted. But as I’ve talked about so many times before, painted brickwork is a hard bell to unring, so in cases where that couldn’t be salvaged, we sometimes have decided to frame out over it with a furred out space and install a new tile in a reference to the original brick, with a gorgeous texture, give it a fun stack bond pattern, and maybe leave for someone else the ability to come back to the original brick.
If there’s a better way of the future to get paint off of it, I don’t know what that would be. Another thing. Well, yeah, a big whole house scale thing might be windows and doors, sourcing the right windows and doors, finding that there may be real world costs you hadn’t expected, or time delays around them can still be worth putting a project on hold, because once you have replaced your windows and doors, you’ll be very disinclined to re-replace them with a better quality in five years, in 10 years, ever, in your lifetime of living in the house, it will not feel worthwhile.
And that actually, that psychological re replacement cost can apply this at a micro level, even this is I mentioned in. The mindset reset episode from last fall for my sister’s house. One thing she ended up doing in part of the end of construction chaos was upgrading a dishwasher choice. And I mentioned that just as a she had the opportunity to rethink her dishwasher choice and ended up not settling for a lower end one, to stay on budget, but going for a splurge model that was only about $100 more likely a small decision, and dishwashers can and are replaced without whole house remodels.
You can have one dishwasher swapped out from another, relatively simply. But there’s also the mindset element of it. And my sister is a Hansmann, she would have a really hard time replacing a functional dishwasher with a slightly better, different dishwasher at any point in her lifetime of living in the house, because it’s just illogical. It’s a waste of money. It’s a do over. It’s duplicating work you’ve already done.
And this is really another thing like it’s easy enough to swap out one length fixture that was temporary for one you’ve really been waiting for that’s shipping from somewhere that was delayed. But if it gets into any kind of a pricey element at all, you may be unwilling to make a replacement choice for something you already chosen, paid for once.
So investing in something that’s going to work for you the first time, if it’s what matters to you is worth it, let’s see. Yeah, I think tracking down the finished materials that you love, investing if what matters to you is really beautiful, built ins, investing in a good cabinet maker, finding a relationship you trust, so that your built ins can truly shine and last the length of the house and be timeless enough not to feel like they need to be done, to keep back into trend in the next 10 or 15 years, or just be shabby after about 10 or 15 years, can be really worth it, ultimately, only you can know what the one spin out boil over moment will be for you.
I want to use that metaphor specifically, by the way, because the moment when your remodel starts to boil over, just like an actual simmering pot is best handled before it actually gets water into the gas element of your cooktop. If you can see it starting to over boil and just turn it down to a lower simmer. You have had a moment of adrenaline. You had a little oops, a close shave, but you haven’t done anything wrong. The worst response to something beginning to boil over is to watch it completely boil over, to miss it getting to the boil over moment turn the heat off, yank it off the stove, pour some of it down the sink.
Now you’ve created a mess. It’s dangerous, it’s more chaotic. It’s harder to get back to a continuous point. So again, this is where the Master Plan mindset is going to help you to see this last stressful thing you’re going to fixate on coming your boil over moment and prevent it from actually boiling over. It’s an almost boil over moment when done right and choosing how you’re going to respond to it is something you can do when you’re always coming back to your master plan philosophy of what matters most to you and why and then making your choices from there.
As I’m finishing up this episode. I’m already thinking forward to the episode I want to record about mid-century housing developments in England and in the US, and as I’ve been reminding myself of housing history in the US one of the biggest failure modes for all of our multifamily all our high density housing again and again and again in this country, when you look at the specific history of a specific project development, why it ended up failing isn’t because it was conceptually bad.
It’s because there were compromises made in the design because of projected cost overruns that ended up sinking the entire project. They were supposed to be mixed and varied in scale, have townhouses and mid-rise and high rise altogether. Or they were supposed to have mixed use development, which would have kept shopping centers on the lower floors, that would have kept this place alive and activated and made it safer or be landscaped in such a way that people felt at home and had garden space and more room to live out their whole lives.
And those things always get axed because it was too slow, too expensive, too complicated. Then a short decade or two later, the entire housing project gets dynamited, literally, Google Pruitt Igoe, if you want to know what I’m talking about. What a waste.
So that’s obviously a very extreme case. I don’t think you’re going to end up taking major demolition explosives to your house if you flinch at the last possible moment on a big design question that spins up in its complexity right before you’re done with a remodel. But I do think. So ultimately, we need to think about these choices in proportion to the cost, the opportunity, the effort of a whole remodel.
What’s worth it to you is a question that I can’t ultimately answer for you, but I do encourage you to lean in and invest a little bit more in the thing that matters to you. Ultimately, even if some of what you’re investing is your time and your frustration delaying the project, it can be worth it. That’s true in life as well as in remodels. So hopefully this hasn’t felt too sanctimonious, but helpful reminder that you’re not going to get from a contractor that you will get from any friend you ask how their remodel went and what was the last frustrating thing that held them up when to consider a mid remodel mindset reset and what to do about it.
For our mid-century house feature of the week, I’m going to keep on harping on this topic. Let’s talk about the kidney shaped pool, and I’ll just let me keep this short and sweet. This is another example of if what you dream of if what your house needs to feel complete as a design is a kidney shaped pool. It’s going to be more expensive and complicated than a rectilinear one, but it might just be worth it. Okay, that’s all I have to say about that.
Let’s talk about the history. The very first kidney shaped pool was designed by modernist architect Alvar Aalto and put into a villa created in 1939 in Finland. This is, I’m not sure I’m pronouncing this correctly, but Villa Maria. It’s a gorgeous house, a total experiment. The owners, who are patrons of the arts and just wanted things to be as creative and cool as possible. But it ended up really kicking off a movement in California when it came, when it’s made its way over to the United States, with the designs of landscape architect Thomas Church creating a home for the Danelle family in Sonoma, California.
This ended up on the cover of House Beautiful in 1951 and became an icon. And it is iconically associated with California modernism, with mid-century homes with overwhelm overhanging eaves, with full glass walls with a living room that turns into a patio that goes right out to a kidney shaped pool. There were probably, per a recent dwell article, 20,000 of them installed per year in the Greater Los Angeles region.
About 60% of all the pools in California are kidney shaped pools, and they also kicked off a skateboarding movement when there was a drought in the 1970s and the state asked homeowners to conserve water by draining their pools. Teens started slipping into people’s backyards and having impromptu skate competitions in those kidney shaped pools. So this a fun piece of cultural history as well as a great icon of mid-century design.
I’ll put some fun pictures of kiddy shaped pools into the show notes page for this episode, also a link to the dwell article about how the 70s skateboarding movement took off in part thanks to that drought in the 1970s and all of the empty kidney shaped pools that were there in the greater LA area for freestyle skaters to literally dive into. I’m curious if you love a kidney pool, if you’ve had a kidney shaped pool.
I’ve got a client right now. We won’t, we won’t be changing. They’ve already done their pool over but they have a lovely kidney shaped pool in their backyard, and part of what we’re going to be doing is improving the way that the house responds to that pool.
Better kitchen orientation, better owner suite orientation, better living room orientation, to appreciate, take in and flow out to a kidney shaped pool. So when you’ve got one you make it the centerpiece of your remodel improvement projects and your design goals.
As always, hit me up on Instagram if you’ve got stories or examples or strong feelings about the kidney shaped pool as a mid-century house feature. Is it necessary? Is it frippery? Is it even mid-century? If it was invented in Finland in the late 30s, I would argue yes, because it is iconic to California in the 50s and 60s. That’s all for now.
I will be back next week. I’m going to go ahead and tell you right now I think next week’s episode is going to be about mid-century housing in London, in in England, in South England, anyway, where I have photo evidence, and the way that both post war England and post war America handled our housing shortage and created a culture based on the housing typologies that we featured. I think it’s gonna be really fun one.
And if you want to see a lot of pretty pictures of it, you will absolutely want to tune into the show notes page. I’ll have a bunch of Instagram stories about mid-century architecture in Britain as well over the next couple of weeks. So stay tuned there for that and catch you next week, mid model remodeler.