I get it … It’s tempting to jump right into renovations when you purchase a new mid-century house. Sometimes, and for some projects, that makes sense.
But before you do anything drastic, I’m going to encourage you to take a step back and live with your house for a little while.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Think big picture, start with small tweaks
Now, you don’t need to spend months or years planning before tackling ANY projects. But the best thing you can do to move quickly is create a Master Plan, even if it’s a quick version.
A Master Plan is a way to map out your long-term goals while allowing yourself the flexibility to start small. Work through the key steps of the Master Plan Process: Dream, Discover, and Distill. These steps will help you prioritize and decide which projects to tackle first. It’s all about using your time, money, and energy efficiently, so you’re not rushing into choices you might regret.
Visualize Your Ideal Home
Start by imagining the life you want to create in your new home. What’s important to you? Do you need a dedicated workspace? Are you looking for a kitchen that’s perfect for entertaining? Before diving into any renovations, think about how the house will support your life—or fail to—and start making notes.
Even if you don’t have your keys yet, you can still use this time to set priorities. Take note of any big lifestyle changes that come with this move, like needing more privacy or extra space for noisy activities. Dreaming about your ideal home will give you a clearer sense of what needs to change and what you want to keep.
Get to Know the House you Chose
Learning the quirks of your new home is an essential step before making any big changes. If you can, attend the inspection or walk around the house with an expert to identify any immediate issues. Take lots of pictures, measure everything, and be observant about the original features that give the house its character.
If you’re still in the house-hunting phase, use this time to research the neighborhood, the year the house was built, and any other details that might give you insights into its history. This knowledge will help you make informed decisions about what to preserve and what to update.
Nail down your Mid Mod Style
Start refining your personal style and figure out how it aligns with your home’s character. Even if you have a favorite mid-century era or color scheme in mind, consider how it will fit with the existing elements of your home, like wood tones, brick, or other materials. You can always adjust your style to incorporate these original features or make subtle changes that blend the old with the new.
Now, take your new style guide for a spin
Once you have the keys in hand and are taking some time to live with your home before making changes you can’t undo, focus on getting a first big win with quick updates that can have big impact on your experience of your new home. Start with “level one” changes—simple things like cleaning, painting walls, or replacing outdated light fixtures. If you’re itching for an exterior project, try a new mailbox, house numbers, or even a fresh coat of paint in a mid-century color scheme. These (non-permanent) starter projects can make the house feel more like yours without risking any big remodel regrets.
And, starting small doesn’t mean you’re stuck. Use these early updates to test out your style and make your house feel like home. While you’re settling in, keep working on your master plan so you can tackle bigger projects down the road with confidence.
In Today’s Episode You’ll Hear:
- Why you need quality time with your new house before you remodel.
- How to get started even before your get the keys.
- Where to think big and start small.
Quick Design tip for your…red brick.
If you have a little or a lot of red brick on your house with a red brick mid mod house, you have a lot of options. There are a range of right colors for your siding:
- You can lean into natural warmth of the brick with a a warm red-brown from within the color family of your particular brick.
- You can choose to highlight the brick by creating a subtle contrast with a darker gray or a green, a mossy tone.
- You could make the brick a standout feature by highlighting it against a high contrast color, like a bright pop, a teal or white.
Regardless of whether you choose to match, highlight or contrast your brick, mid-century color work is always about creating big block areas of color. Avoid outlining every little accent detail.
When you’re creating a contrast with your brick in the siding color, to do the siding and the trim around the doors and windows in that field of the siding area all one color. For windows, doors and trim in the brick area, consider a separate color that’s closer to the brick itself.
Always test your final few colors right on the house, in sun and in shadow, next to your existing stone or brick.
Mid Mod House Feature of the Week
Color Block Bathrooms
Tile bathrooms are a relic of the last big sweeping pandemic in 1918, which ended up influencing a lot of Building Construction Technology.
That pandemic was the advent of the ubiquity of ceramic tile in kitchens and bathrooms because it was easy to wipe down and sterilize. It could take any amount of harsh cleaning solvents without being eroded. The most common tile was standard, white subway tile, but in the mid mods (of course!) wanted to take that style up a notch.
They already had this very simple standard, four by four color block tile. Then they added all sorts of details like bullnoses and built in soap dishes and cup holders and toothbrush holders. Eventually, colorful fixtures became more and more common…and your pink color block bathroom was born!
Listen Now On
Resources for your New Mid-Century House
- Considering color options for your red brick house? Snag my FREE color carousel!
- Saturday October 26th is going to be a LIVE one – my free Masterclass that is! I’m going live with “How to Plan an MCM Remodel to Fit Your Life(…and Budget)”. Sign up today!
- Still searching for your mid-century dream home? Check out my home buying guidance.
- Get the essential elements of my master plan process in my new mini-course, Master Plan in a Month.
- Want us to master plan for you? Find out all the details with my mini-class, Three Secrets of a Regret-Proof Mid Mod Remodel.
And you can always…
- Join us in the Facebook Community for Mid Mod Remodel
- Find me on Instagram:@midmodmidwest
- Find the podcast on Instagram: @midmodremodelpodcast
Read the Full Episode Transcript
Della Hansmann
When you’re in a time crunch, you want to use your energy, your time, even your money, very efficiently. And there are all kinds of reasons why you might be feeling like you’re remodeling in a rush, but a very common example is a new house. I’ve been asked in the past, and recently, again, for a quick start, guide to what you should do when you first become the owner of a mid-century home. So let’s get into that today.
Della Hansmann
By the way, I think this will be really useful advice for anyone who’s being stuck in their mid-century home. You could use this and just pretend you got your house that’s fine, or if your problem is different, if you’ve been feeling frozen and you don’t know where to begin, I will be talking specifically about that. I’ve been in the house too long, and I need to break this impasse energy in a later episode this season.
Della Hansmann
But today, let’s talk about what to do first, next and next, not last. When you become the next owner of your new home, your new to your mid-century home. Hey there. Welcome back to mid ma 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, listening to Episode 1903.
Della Hansmann
Okay, before I get into today’s topic, more deeply, I should just say that everything I’m talking about today is borrowing from the master plan method, the minimum, fastest way to do this, the if you do nothing else, kind of energy about buying a home. This is a chaotic moment when a lot of other stuff is going on in your life, possibly shifting locations, packing big feelings in your family, new jobs, making yourself at home in a whole new place, not just your house. So that’s why we’re going to talk about the minimum viable home change approach.
Della Hansmann
But what you should really do, what would absolutely be ideal for you to do right now in this new home moment is show up for the free mid-century master class I’m giving on Saturday three days from now. This is going to be the why and the how to the exact right way to set your big vision for your house and break it into the pieces you really want to tackle right now, feeling so confident that everything you’re doing today is a move towards your goals that you will not regret.
Della Hansmann
See my last episode about regrets if you jump in too fast without a plan, and that the things you do right now will move you forward towards your bigger goals, even if you’re only tackling a reasonable amount right now because, you know, big move energy having the whole house vision is what you want before you do anything more than a level one change, before you’ve thought deeply about your style, before you’ve really lived into the house and figured out what it needs and does not need.
Della Hansmann
Please, it may seem counterintuitive in this new house crunch to talk about thinking big of a huge master plan process. But here’s the thing, the Master Plan process can be as big or small as it needs to be. All of this thinking is going to be actually sped up and facilitated and made more easy and efficient by following the steps of the master plan process. Which doesn’t have to mean you spend months or years going through it. It might mean you do it very quickly and very efficiently, just touching each step to make sure you’ve gotten what you need.
Della Hansmann
So you can trust your own feelings, so you can be on the same page with your partner, so you can just work through getting your options in front of you, and then weeding through them, mixing things out of them as quickly as possible, and so that you can set how it should all look and workshop what actions you could take, so that you can take them as quickly as possible.
Della Hansmann
Once you go into it, this class is for you. It’s going to walk you through how to do that. If all you did was just sit through this class, I will take you through the concepts you want to be thinking about, so that as you have conversations about what you could do, what you should do, what you will do, you’ll be framing them in the mid-century Master Plan method.
Della Hansmann
So I encourage you to come to planning a mid-century remodel to fit your life and budget. Also for anyone out there who’s not in a brand new house, but you need to make some changes to your house, or the stage of your house ownership is shifting. I want you to check out this class. It is basically everything I believe in, and I only have the energy to take out of my core business to do this class live a couple of times a year.
Della Hansmann
Last time was February, but I love to do it because this is the way I feel like I can help everyone the most, the fastest, the most effectively. It’s where I can offer encouragement, a permission structure to make choices that are right for you, and a step by step process that you can use to always check yourself to make sure you’re on the right path. Now, sometimes just getting that framing is what you need, and if so, please come to this class and check it out.
Della Hansmann
But I will tell you that at the end of it, I’m going to describe how I offer more support to people, and that is inside my ready to remodel program. A bunch of people who are going to come to this live class on Saturday will probably join me inside that program. So there’s going to be a wonderful cohort energy. I call this a mid mod remod squad. And during the time of a fresh mid mod remod squad, I’m going to be doing architect Office Hours calls at greater rate. More than once per month.
Della Hansmann
And I’m going to be giving another mid-century house layout Buster challenge. These are where I take someone’s floor plan, submit it in advance, put it on my tablet, share the screen, and we just go through options in real time. It’s scribbly, it’s real, it’s messy, and it’s usually revelatory for more people than the person whose house I’m working on. It’s a blast.
Della Hansmann
This ready to remodel program is my best way to offer the hand holding that you might be needing to get your questions answered, the questions you’re wondering about, why is your new home like that? Is that a mid-century thing? Is it a previous owner’s mistake? What’s up? Or the questions about what you should do next? What’s the best way to make a timeless, non-trendy choice, what’s the best solution to a specific layout problem or to a specific material challenge?
Della Hansmann
That kind of support I can offer inside of ready to remodel, which inside that program is really the way that I’m able to give people the fastest support and decisiveness if I’m hired to do a master plan for a client. I love this. Because I can go deep. I can show drawings. And I can visualize it different ways. I can sit with a project. But that very deepness means it takes time for me and my team to put that together, and right now, we are pretty fully booked.
Della Hansmann
So the people we’re signing contracts with right now who are hiring us to do master plans for them, they’ll be getting their results in the new year, but people who are joining ready to remodel next week are going to be asking me their questions in real time. So first, I encourage you to show up for the free class on Saturday and ask your questions, because that’s also one of my favorite parts about doing the class live.
Della Hansmann
The class is about an hour, and then afterwards, I stick around for half an hour, sometimes an hour, answering the questions of everybody shows up about their particular house, about worrying about how to talk to contractors, about a thing their uncle said to them that’s got them rattled about what’s the best first step for them, whatever the question is, we get that answer done inside the live class, but ready to remodel is the system I created so I could give people ongoing support for months or years.
Della Hansmann
So that they can feel ready to take action, whether they’re introducing themselves to a brand new house to them, or they’ve been in the house for decades because their kids have gone from toddlers to teenagers, or are leaving the house they’re about to be empty nesters, or they’re retiring And they want to feel a new support for their recreational activities, rather than just a house they work from all of these people I’m describing, by the way, are not stick figures. They’re people I have helped inside of ready to remodel and have really enjoyed it.
Della Hansmann
But one of the key groups that has gotten the most action and the most immediacy out of ready to remodel are people who are new to a mid-century house and working to make it their home. That’s why today’s topic of your quick start guide to a new mid-century home, a new to you. Mid-century home, your new home, is a perfect match for this upcoming workshop. We’ll get into that right after the resource snippet. Let’s talk about picking the perfect color for your mid-century house. Choosing a color scheme for your home is one of the most effective ways to put your stamp on a house and start the process of making it your home.
Della Hansmann
Specifically, today, we’re going to talk about the range of right colors for your siding. If you have a little or a lot of red brick on your house with a red brick mid mod house, you have a lot of options. You can choose a warm red brown from within the color family of your particular brick. Remember, you’re always going to want to test swatches in real world, and that will help the whole house cohere. It’ll help it feel smaller in some ways.
Della Hansmann
And if you don’t like the spacing or the placing of the brick, it might sort of balance it and make the brick areas less obvious. You could also highlight the brick by creating a subtle contrast with a darker gray or a green, a mossy tone. You could make the brick a standout feature by highlighting it against a high contrast color, like a bright pop, a teal, perhaps or perhaps white, although with red brick and white, this is a look I often try to avoid, particularly red brick, white siding and black trim and maybe fake black shutters.
Della Hansmann
This will instantly keep your tip your house towards a colonial styling or a mid-century traditional one thing to keep in mind, mid-century color work is always about creating big block areas of color, rather than outlining every little accent detail with trim. So you might choose, if you’re creating a contrast with your brick in the siding color, to do the siding and the trim around the doors and windows in that field of the siding area,
Della Hansmann
all one color, but in the windows, doors and trim areas in the brick area, you could choose to use that contrasting color, or you might choose a separate color that’s closer to the brick itself, chosen from within its range of color variabilities. Remember, the right choice of color for your house does have to do with existing features like brick or stone or the fact that your three closest neighbors have already all picked the same color house.
Della Hansmann
And you don’t want to match or with your general environment desert versus Midwest autumn color scheme or thinking about how it will look in snow. But it also has to do with what you like. If your goal is to make the house a vintage tweed time capsule or a classy, dramatic update, if you want to stand out or blend in and always take time to swatch.
Della Hansmann
You don’t want to pick a house color from a two inch square card, get a quart can or several and a brush and test your final few colors right on the house, in sun and in shadow, test them next to your existing stone or brick. So far, so good.
Della Hansmann
If you need more guidance, or if you want to see some of the color options I’ve been talking about, I’ve pulled together all my best mid-century house color advice and a free guide. Go grab it at mid mod, midwest.com/colors as always, you’ll find show notes for the entire episode with a transcript and links to any references I make at mid mod, midwest.com/ 1903.
Della Hansmann
Okay, so let’s talk about the Quick Start actions you can take to make good choices, regret proof, choices for your mid-century home as you’ve just bought it, perhaps if you’re still even in the house transfer process, potentially even if you are still in the house hunt process. Here are the things you can do that matter less how much you have the ability to take action right now.
Della Hansmann
These are the things you need to do in order to set yourself up for a good remodel. Overall. In the long haul, the big picture, you can always spend time on dreaming about your ideal home. And I don’t just mean you know the fantasy version, flipping through catalogs. I mean dream in the sense of the mid-century master plan step the dream phase is about paying attention to what matters, what’s going to be most important to you.
Della Hansmann
Now, if you already have a glimpse of the house, if you’re in the purchasing process, think about how this house is going to be different from other homes you’ve lived in, and how it will support your life better, and how it might actually fail to support your life in some key ways that you’re going to need to account for as you move in.
Della Hansmann
Does it not have the office space or the private space separation or the flow or the kitchen footprint that you’re used to in your previous home or homes? So start to make a list of those things. And also just think about who are you going to be in this new space, in this perhaps new phase of your life, you’re going to want to think about what are your must do priorities, not necessarily your first things to do, although you can use this process to think about what are your level one updates that you’re going to take on before you even have your master plan firmed up.
Della Hansmann
But think about what are the most important areas of this home to you in its future. So that kind of dreaming can actually be done even if you don’t know what house you’re going to move into. You can dream while you house hunt, while you look at a range of houses. You can set your priorities for what is an absolute necessity in your house, hunt, search, or for what you’d know, if you were going to choose a house, you’d know it’s not going to meet some key element of dream.
Della Hansmann
It does not have a space for part of your family that likes loud, noisy fun games to be and then another equally good space for the two quiet parts of your family, those two people to go off and have quiet reading time together. There’s only space for one quiet or loud activity in the house. So that’s going to be something you need to change. So dreaming, asking what matters to you in this phase of your life and looking forward is always important.
Della Hansmann
And even if you’re planning to do a really quick remodel, if you are planning to get the keys to the place and have the contractors come in and start demo the next day, well then you need to do dream more, you need to think about this more deeply faster, sooner, because this is what’s going to be the difference between a great remodel you love and an expensive remodel that you end up feeling not so good about.
Della Hansmann
Okay, the next thing I’m going to suggest is the next step in the master plan process, again, in predesign, before you get into your options and then narrowing them down to your choices, you need to know what’s going on in the house. So this does require that you learn the house. You need to know what house you’re moving into.
Della Hansmann
So you have to have an accepted offer, or, you know, be fixating on a particular house. Even before that, you can start to learn the house in a few key ways.
Della Hansmann
Even if you can’t get inside of it, you can meet the neighbors, you can get in an inspection on the house as part of the purchase process and read it in detail. My favorite way to do this, actually, is if you’re still house hunting, if you’re planning right now, when the house is getting its inspection be there. This has been part of the pandemic, the housing crunch that we’re in.
Della Hansmann
There are certain parts of the country where people are taking an inspector with them to open houses so that they can make an inspection, light offer on the house. They don’t have to have a contingency for an inspection. They’re just like, it’s good enough. I had someone with me, but I actually love this idea, because when you are with your expert, when you’re walking around the house with them, you’re seeing something entirely different in the house. When you look through their eyes, you.
Della Hansmann
Look at the house and you think, great, the sun is good. I can put some furniture in that corner. This countertop kind of grungy. Maybe it’s got to go. They are looking at the house and thinking, Do I see any signs of moisture damage? Are there any history of insect movement? If there is a little bit of a cracking in the basement foundation, they’re going to look at that and have an opinion about whether that happened two years after the house was built and has never moved again, and it’s not a problem.
Della Hansmann
Or it looks like it might be in motion right now, and this is a red flag for something that’s going to need to be addressed right away. So getting an inspection and really being involved in it, ideally, being able to follow the inspector around and ask them questions, my favorite way to learn a house. But you can also dig in on history. This is a fun time when you’re sort of, particularly if you don’t have a lot of access to the house between when you walked through it, you saw it a couple of times at the realtor.
Della Hansmann
You made your offer, it was accepted. Now you gotta wait till closing, and you just can’t go there. It can drive you nuts. This is a great time to dig for history, to think about the history of development in your town. I just published a chat that I had this summer with Adam Stevens about the Parade of Homes, the history of them in general, and specifically the 1955 Parade of Homes in Madison, Wisconsin, and the similarly great one that was held in Denver, Colorado that same year, and how much you can take from the vintage advertising and the styles and the trends and the products that were popular in that moment.
Della Hansmann
So think about the year that your house, your new to you, house, was built, and do a little history on that house, or neighboring houses in your area, or other houses created by that builder or that designer. And you can also just be observant. If you get a chance to be in the house, you can go and take measurements. You can scan it with magic plan to get a floor plan.
Della Hansmann
You can take a lot of pictures. Take so many pictures, because if you’ve got access only on one day, you want to sort of sit there and Moon over the house and think about built ins and wood trim and colors and stains. You need a photographic record for that. And also you can just be observant of its features.
Della Hansmann
Think about where does it have its original trim? And where have things been painted? Where did it seem like there was a repair project or a 90s remodel or something you want to change? And where did you notice that there seemed to be a layer of something underneath? Is there perhaps hardwood underneath the carpet? I’ve said this before, but the secret for that is in a house built before 1954 so if it was built in the late 40s or the early 50s, any wall to wall carpet probably has hardwood floors underneath it.
Della Hansmann
After that less so that’s because in 1954 the basically the military industrial complex realized that they didn’t have a good enough use for nylon anymore. And the nylon industry was like, Okay, we got to figure out how to mass market this product to somebody else. I know, homeowners. And so they came up with, basically invented the product of wall to wall nylon carpeting. There had been wall to wall carpeting before that, but it was wool, and it was very high end, very expensive and sort of a handcraft thing.
Della Hansmann
So wall to wall, nylon carpeting became this marketing huge push. It was everywhere. There are all these vintage ads of women sitting in beautiful cocktail dresses, sprawled out on the carpet, acting like they’re just like, orgasmically thrilled with carpet. That is, it’s carpet. It’s not that great.
Della Hansmann
Also, the mid-century carpet that they were putting down in their houses now is 70 plus years old, and it’s got 70 years of dirt and dust and microbes in it. I’m sorry. It’s just disgusting. If you’ve got walled wall carpet in your mid-century house, please pull it out. I don’t even care what’s underneath it. If there’s something else underneath it, you can choose a new flooring material.
Della Hansmann
And as a new home purchaser, I mean, I lived with my wall to wall carpet in the living area in the hallway for at least a year. It made me miserable. I hated it. And I should have pulled it out immediately. I had hardwood underneath it. Honestly, I don’t know what was wrong with me, but I would have lived with subfloor for any amount of time to not have to experience that carpet once I knew how nice it was to get it gone.
Della Hansmann
Anyway, I’m getting distracted from what you can discover. So okay, so you’re going, you’re going to dream about your house. You’re going to dream about yourself, your life in the house. You’re going to discover the house itself. Get to know its quirks, its dimensions. Start thinking practically about how rooms that don’t need a lot of work can fit your existing furniture or new furniture. Start thinking about where you might be on the move towards making layout changes.
Della Hansmann
And the third thing you need to know that you can easily think about before you get into the house, before you get the keys, is what should it look like you can work on the distill phase, pulling together your personal style for the house. And even though you may have had a moment in mid-century history that was your favorite and a sense of how much you like to preserve or update. Now you’re going to apply that to your actual new home. And so even though you might have a passionate love for dark wood stains, the walnuts, the teaks of the world, maybe your house has a whole lot of really beautiful light pine.
Della Hansmann
Yeah. So you have to ask yourself, Is that something you want to change throughout the entire house, or do you maybe want to modify your personal style guide a little bit, bring more pine into it, or find a way to bring in a darker tone wood stain that complements what’s already there so you don’t have to replace original materials. You can start to think about, what metal, what woodwork, what stone, brick, etc, exists in the house, and how you want to interact with that as you start to make new choices for it.
Della Hansmann
All of this work is going to allow you to more quickly for your master plan and take big action. But once you’ve gotten the keys in your hand, you might want to take small, fast action. So let’s talk about what you can do painlessly, regret-proof-ily in those earliest stages, you can clean that’s boring, but it really does help make the house seem like your own, and you can paint now.
Della Hansmann
Please don’t paint anything that has not been painted before. Don’t paint the woodwork or the brick. Do not rush in and give the house a fresh update by painting the entire brick facade white. Please, please, please, don’t do that. Even if you feel an impulse to do it, sit with it for a minute. Think about it. It might pass. And once brick is painted, it can never be unpainted. So I really want to encourage people not to paint previously on painted surfaces.
Della Hansmann
But you can go ahead and paint the walls. Paint them a fresh neutral white, if that feels good to you. If you’re bold and you want to pick an accent color already, color, already paint them an accent color. Bring color into your house, even if you’re planning to get to a bigger remodel within the year, don’t live with any colors in the house that you actively hate for any amount of time. It’s not a good idea.
Della Hansmann
You can also remove things. You can think about editing or subtracting from the house anything that is a remodel from a mid-century, from a non-mid-century period. So anything that was done to the house in the 1990s in the 2000s anything the previous owner thought they were flipping or updating. If you’ve got the energy and the time to take that right back out, do it, pull that stuff out. You’ll be replacing it.
Della Hansmann
You’re going to come in with something else. If the house has fake shutters and you’re looking for anything other than a really twee mid-century vintage look, if you’re looking for mid mod, pull those shutters right off, you’ll make the house instantly your own. You can go ahead and choose to do an exterior paint upgrade all at once in your sort of move in energy. And that can be really fun as well.
Della Hansmann
And as I would just encourage you to think about colors for that, I talked about colors earlier on this episode, and really do Lean into the idea that you’re making mid-century choices, not cottage choices. So be leery of anyone that’s advising you to choose a high contrast trim color when you’re painting, or you’ll find yourself like me going back to paint the trim again. But paint is a great way inside and outside of the house.
Della Hansmann
Take your style guide, your thoughts on distilling for a test. Spin on little level one projects, replacing a light fixture here and there. That’s easy. And if you want to replace them again later, you can hang up a new mailbox, new house numbers, all of these things to make it your own.
Della Hansmann
If you want to tackle if you’re going to do a DIY remodel and you want to tackle one space in the house, I highly recommend that you choose to take your style guide for a test spin on a small room that is disconnected from any potential layout changes you might make later.
Della Hansmann
In some cases, that might be the shared bathroom, unless you’re leaning into potentially you might want Owner’s Suite. Later, you might be changing the layout of that bathroom to give new access, to make that the owner’s bathroom, and put in another one in a in a bedroom, to push out an addition space. But if you think that’s off the table, that’s not in your budget, you don’t eat with your family structure, then go ahead and tackle a bathroom that’s shared by the family. Also a small powder room, a mud room, anywhere that you think you won’t find yourself, limiting your ability to make layout changes and better improvements to the overall functionality of the house.
Della Hansmann
Later, while you’re taking this kind of action, giving yourself that satisfaction, the dopamine hit of making the house your own, you should also be thinking about drafting, considering your options. What could you do for the house? Anything is on the table. The sky’s the limit, until you start to think about energy and budget, and you know how much of yourself you’re pouring into just transferring your family from one place to another, rooting yourself into a new community, catching up on work that got drafted out of your attention span in the move.
Della Hansmann
All of these things can be distractions, but they can also be necessity parts of life. So balance your energy level, but once you’ve thought about the sky’s the limit, you’re gonna prioritize. You will develop your master plan, and you will think about what is possible, what is probable, and what you actually will do, at least what you’ll do right away. Of course, remember that with a master plan, with a whole vision for what you could do in your house. You can break it apart into pieces.
Della Hansmann
And the part you do first after a move in might be large, because you want to knock off a whole bunch of big things before you’ve really settled in, before you’ve moved in, even perhaps. Or it might be small, because you’re going to do the few most necessary things, and you’re going to come back in a year, in two years, in five. Years with bigger budget, bigger energy and a bigger change plan.
Della Hansmann
All right, the most efficient way to plan any project for your home, large or small, is to go through all of the steps of the master plan process in detail. But I titled this episode quick start guide, because it’s about what you can do right away, what you can do with your first New House Energy, and what you can do confidently, knowing that you probably won’t end up regretting this, no matter what else happens.
Della Hansmann
So let’s actually talk about each phase of becoming a new mid-century homeowner, and what’s the right action to be taking most effectively in that time, there are things you can do towards your master plan process to speed up and condense your ultimate wait time before you can begin remodeling while you house hunt.
Della Hansmann
And I’ve talked about this a little bit in the episode that I had about searching for a mid-century house and kind of gaming the new versus old mid-century house system. You’re a lot of people are looking for a house that hasn’t been updated too much, that might not even be marketed as mid-century. The realtor who’s selling it to you might not get mid-century. And all of that can help you really luck into a wonderful house with great, original features and no mistakes in it yet.
Della Hansmann
So that’s part of the philosophy, but you can also be thinking forward towards what you might do for your house, so that when you get into it, when you start taking action, you do that efficiently. If you’re still in the house hunting phase, you’ll be actively looking at neighborhoods, researching them, thinking about vibes and distances and perhaps the mid-century quality of that space. You’ll also be thinking about your own taste and preferences.
Della Hansmann
That is what you need in terms of living space and types of togetherness, spaciousness, enclosedness, sound, privacy and your taste in terms of style appearance, mid-century esthetic, vintage versus updated early, mid-century versus late. You can take my mid-century style quiz. What else? You can watch some of your favorite vintage TV shows and see how they light you up or not. You can flip through magazines. Take walks through neighborhoods and gets inspired thinking about those dream and distill elements are going to be your best effort expended during the time of the house hunt.
Della Hansmann
All of that changes once you have an offer accepted, now you have the opportunity to spend more time thinking about the house itself. If you’re lucky, you can get in and measure the house. You might have the opportunity to give it a scan with a cell phone app like magic plan. Or you might have access to the realtor or the or a contractor’s technology to do even more sophisticated scan of the space.
Della Hansmann
You can take extensive photographs, you can get to know the neighbors, research the area, and you can start to even work towards the process of making changes at the house, by interviewing and getting to know different contractors, showing them the house, at least in photograph form, and getting a sense of what that process might be like once the house is actually yours, once you have taken the title of the house.
Della Hansmann
Now, technically, you have the ability to do anything you want to the house, but I still recommend that you limit yourself to either simple level one changes, simple substitutions, or small one off DIY projects like painting something that hasn’t been painted before, replacing light fixtures, even plumbing fixtures, updating a front door, a mailbox, things like that. But I wouldn’t recommend that you go in and, for example, replace all of the windows or do an immediate kitchen level remodel of the house without going through the Master Plan process. You are guaranteed to make some choices you will later regret when you have a little more time to think about it. Think about it.
Della Hansmann
So limit yourself to spaces that you can take your nascent style ideas out for a spin. Think about how they’re working. Get your get your hands dirty a little bit on the house. And as you do that, your sense of what is possible and probable and right for you in this house is going to grow until you have confidence and whenever you need to move quickly, I recommend sticking to the process go in the right order.
Della Hansmann
As Kendra Adachi of the lazy genius podcast always says, it’s really important to follow every step of the master plan, process and order, so save yourself a huge amount of time once the house is actually yours by having done your dream, your discover and your distill homework in advance, so you can start to explore all the possibilities and then choose what we write for you.
Della Hansmann
One dramatic choice I’m hoping that you won’t need to make, but you might be tempted to when you move into a mid-century houses to take out, or in some cases, you’ll get an idea from Pinterest that you can paint over the color block tile in an original mid-century four by four tile color block bathroom.
Della Hansmann
If you are fortunate enough to have some fun vintage a pink bathroom, a blue bathroom, a peach bathroom, you may decide that the layout of it is inconvenient to the rest of your life and it has to go, or it’s in such poor repair with plumbing failures and broken tiles based on a bad install on the first date, or, you know, angry teenagers living in that bathroom that it just can’t be salvaged.
Della Hansmann
There may always be reasons why your color block bathroom has to go, but I’m going to talk a little bit about the history of the four by four tiles specifically, and the color block bathroom as it is, and hopefully get you excited to potentially think about keeping that or playing with it as you modify to that end. It’s very appropriate that the featured mid-century house area this week is four by four color block tile. So this is an absolutely default element of particularly an early mid-century home.
Della Hansmann
And while many people find themselves to be frustrated by being locked into a colorway they don’t like, or sometimes a mid-century combination of the wall tile is blue and all of the fixtures, the toilet, the sink, the tub, our peach, that’s one of my least favorite combinations, or it just has sort of faded into a weird, bland beige or something. You might not love the mid-century tile color, but the concept of these colorful bathrooms is really part of the joy of the mid-century era. Now, bathroom tile had actually not been around for that long before the mid-century era came along.
Della Hansmann
It’s a relic of the last big sweeping pandemic, the 1918 pandemic, which ended up influencing a lot of Building Construction Technology. After that, people were very concerned with having fresh air introduced into buildings. So there were zoning code regulations which required that all residential bathrooms had to have some natural light and ventilation. That’s no longer code now that we have exhaust fans, sometimes people can choose to put a bathroom in the in the center of a house and it doesn’t have access to any windows that could operate.
Della Hansmann
Or you can have a window in your bathroom that you seal so it doesn’t open as long as you have mechanical light and ventilation. But back in the day, they wanted to be sure every bathroom had access to fresh air. They also did things like build apartment buildings with oversized boilers so that the residents who didn’t know any better, this is a little paternalistic, so the residents would be forced to basically get overheated in the winter and open up their windows to get fresh air flowing through their units, even in the winter.
Della Hansmann
And it is also the advent of it being really common to put ceramic tile in kitchens and bathrooms because it was easy to wipe down and sterilize and it could take any amount of harsh cleaning solvents without being eroded. It tended to be subway tile. It was also in subways in public places, so that they could also be cleaned and sterilized. Tend to be white subway tile. There just wasn’t a lot of interest in doing other things. But in the mid-century era, they wanted to take that style up a notch.
Della Hansmann
So they had this very simple thing, four by four, standard color block. They had all sorts of different ranges of details of bull noses and built in soap dishes and cup holders and toothpaste holders. If you find yourself in possession of a mid-century bathroom that has all of those details, it’s such a gift. And I’ve also had clients in the past who have had a house that was flipped or stripped of its original character, who have lovingly recreated those original mid-century colorway bathrooms by finding vintage applying fixtures, toilets, tubs and sinks on Facebook marketplace, and then resourcing color block four by four tile to get that sort of cohesive look.
Della Hansmann
If this appeals to you, it is absolutely doable, and it’s a really fun project to take on. But if you don’t have a mid-century color block bathroom, and you’re sort of sorry about it, your options are more than just to go back and make it look like a time capsule house. You can also think about playing with colorways in bathrooms, leaning in on bold colors in your tile or your fixtures. I think it’s always a really fun, personal choice to make.
Della Hansmann
On the other hand, if you don’t feel permanent about a tile color, a fixture color, when you’re thinking about redoing a bathroom almost from scratch, if you have to get in a Change Layout, you’re not going to salvage much in terms of tile, then I do encourage people to choose neutrals that they like, either a color that they feel they can live with through decades, or maybe go with white and bring color into the house in the form of towels or soft finishes shower curtains. There are other ways that you can change your mind.
Della Hansmann
If you know that you’re the kind of person who’s going to have a new favorite color every three years, don’t lean into the most bold color choice. But if you do happen to have those original mid-century colorway bathrooms, just know that they were really an expression of plenty of comfort of being able to go above the bare minimum and put your personality into the house.
Della Hansmann
They were probably if the house was built for a particular person, those colors were picked by the original owners, and that’s just like a fun little connection to have to who was the original person that lived in your house. Us, why might they have chosen those colors? And if you can track down the original owners, or maybe their kids or grandkids, you can ask, why were they making those choices, and what did it say about their family structure, about their preferences and taste?
Della Hansmann
So actually, I’m really curious. I know people are sort of Love it or hate it. No one is neutral and medium about a mid-century color black bathroom. So send me a message on Instagram and let me know, are you pro or con a vintage color block bathroom, or are you so in favor of it that you would go ahead and try to recreate one in a house that didn’t have one anymore? I don’t want to know.
Della Hansmann
Okay, so I just have to ask, Are you signed up for this weekend’s mid-century Master Plan master class. Planning a mid-century remodel to fit your life and budget is for you, my friend, I am sure of it. If you’ve got house projects in mind right now and you’re wondering how to make them happen in the best way, it’s for you.
Della Hansmann
If you’ve been feeling stuck and stagnant about your house and you don’t even know how to break that impasse you feel about it. It’s for you. If you’ve just moved into a new house and you’re trying to figure out how to make it a perfect home, that’s what you tuned in for this episode for because you wanted a quick start guide for your new home. It is for you.
Della Hansmann
Please come. I want you to be there. Okay, I’m done.
Della Hansmann
Wait, no, I’m not. One more thing. I’ve got to tell you that if you’re on the fence about it, or if you’re busy on Saturday, or if you just don’t have the vibe on Saturday, and I think it’s gonna be a really fun class, so I encourage you to come.
Della Hansmann
But if you are otherwise committed, here’s what you can do, sign up for the class anyway, and send me a DM on Instagram to tell me that you did, and then ask me the question you do have about what’s most pressing going on in your house, in your life right now, and I will answer it after the master class in the Q and A section, and then I’ll send you a link to the recording so you can watch the class on your own time.
Della Hansmann
Share it with your spouse or partner who’s not free right then, or maybe needs a little more persuading. And you will hear the answer to your own question about your house, about what’s the first step to take, about budgets, about practicalities of contractor picking and more in the Q A at the end, plus a bunch of other people’s helpful questions that you might also find really useful to hear answered.
Della Hansmann
So go, sign up for the class. Please, please come. It’s going to be such a blast, and I’m so excited to share with you. You can find the show notes for this episode at mid mod midwest.com/ 1903 and you can sign up for the master class at midmod-midwest.com/masterclass. I will see you there.