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New Year, New Remodel Philosophy

13 min readNext year … try going easier on yourself so that you can actually make some remodel progress. Counter intuitive, I know. But it just might work!

Find a new, kinder and easier remodel philosophy in 2023. One that understands perfectionism is a perfect way to prevent yourself from making remodel progress. Real talk folks…it’s more important to begin than to do it perfectly.

Today’s episode is an end-of-year pep talk about setting yourself up for success with reasonable and realistic expectations for yourself around remodel planning.

All of the pressure of the holidays and the New Year can add up to stress and overwhelm instead of comfort and joy. Plus, those of us in the US have an almost obsessive focus on the new beginnings in the new year, with a rush up through December full of social engagements and traditional obligations that conflict with our desire to clear the decks and clean the slate for next year. 

In Today’s Episode You’ll Hear:

  • Why you should give yourself permission to go slowly on your remodel planning.
  • How to apply Kendra Adichi’s Lazy Genius philosophy to the remodel planning process.
  • The four modes of thinking that can help you make real progress.
  • A strategy for identifying the right time (for you!) to tackle remodel planning.  

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Read the Full Episode Transcript

Here’s a new remodel philosophy for your new year. Go easy on yourself in order to make this actually happen. Look, we’re just a few days out from Christmas, and regardless of your familial traditions or your religious persuasion in this country, we have an almost obsessive focus on the new beginnings in the new year and this sort of rush up through December full of social engagements and traditional obligations that conflict with our desire to clear the decks and clean the slate for next year. So for today’s episode, I wanna give you a pep talk that’s both motivational and reassuring.

Hey there. Welcome back to Mid Mod Remodel. This is the show about updating MCM Homes, helping you match a mid-century home to your modern life. I’m your host, Della Hansmann architect and mid-century Ranch enthusiast. You’re listening to Season 10, episode 11. All right. I wanna share with you a new way to think about your home improvement planning process for the new year.

It’s more important to begin than to do it perfectly. Perfectionism is such a perfect way to prevent yourself from doing anything at all, and certainly, it’s a great way to prevent yourself from completing anything. So I want you to give yourself permission to go as slow as you would like to go, as slow as you need to go, as long as you’re still going. Instead of waiting until you have some mythical quantity of free time you’ve had in your mind, that’s necessary to sit down and fully plan a remodel, make an appointment with yourself to just take a few minutes every week just on Monday evening before the week gets away from you, just a few minutes in the morning while you sit with your coffee.

I want to quote here from a person I’m gonna be talking to you about a little more in the new year a few episodes from now, Kendra Adachi. She’s known as The Lazy Genius. She does the Lazy Genius Podcast and she’s written two books, created a very thorough, successful blog empire and she’s a wonderful podcast worth checking out. You can read one of her new books, the Lazy Genius Way or, and this should peak your interest, the Lazy Genius Kitchen. Kendra’s podcast is on my weekly must-listen list, and she gives her readers permission to be a genius about the things that matter and lazy about the things that don’t. 

Now, I don’t absolutely love this terminology she’s hit on here, but her philosophy is gold, I would say translated this into the way I think about a remodel. She’s giving permission for us to obsess and invest our energy and detail into the parts of the house that are important to us and to be efficient or straight up ignore the parts of our homes that are working fine or aren’t as important to our daily lives.

This is a great recipe for remodel and she goes much, much further into her two books and her long-running podcast, which is well worth a listen. Now, fair warning, I don’t have a perfect Venn diagram overlap with Kendra and her life and mine. She’s a mother of three, an observant Christian and a slow talker with a southern accent. All qualities I don’t share, but she’s not pushy about her life choices and style. Rather, she’s inclusive about encouraging people to be their best selves as they are. And I personally find her loving, pushy, big sister style of, come on Kiddo, you’ve got this. Let’s do it together. Very satisfying and relatable and motivational.

You might find her the same. So if you like the way I encourage you to get up and get planning, you’ll probably also like the way she talks to you about making choices that are either genius or lazy for your life. When she says something like, the possibilities are endless, but you don’t need endless, I hear. Let’s set you up a style guide. So it really works for me and I think it will work for you too. I’m gonna do a whole episode on the Lazy Genius Kitchen book soon, and for now, you can go check it out yourself at the link in the show notes or get the transcript for this whole episode at midmod-midwest.com/1011. 

All right, what I want you to hold in your head while you’re thinking about how you might find time to plan this next year is another concept from Kendra’s book. It’s better to do what’s more likely to work than what’s ideal. I’m gonna say that again. It’s better to do what’s more likely to work than what’s ideal. And if you want it to be likely that you’re going to update your home next year, then let’s think how to work within the rhythms of your current daily life or at least the life you’ll have once the holiday chaos settles down slightly and your own brain patterns. 

Part of what’s gonna make getting started on your remodel plans next year more likely, is if you have a formula for planning success. So to go in the order that makes sense and makes your planning easier. And that’s the master plan method, which is the ideal way to simplify and de-stress your remodel and to make sure you don’t skip over the parts of planning that end up making the house right for you and for your family.

So if you’re curious about the master plan method and how I could help your house, I’ve got two easy things to recommend to you. First is go watch the free class I’ve put together now you can watch it on your own time. How to plan a mid-century remodel to fit your life and budget. It’s available free whenever you’re ready. On my website, there’s a link in the show notes, go check it out. Um, but if why, the way your brain works is that you need to start with just one space. You can’t think about the entire house because that’s too much and you wanna just focus on one room, one area, one first step project. Then I highly recommend that you come and check out one room method for my design clinic in January. We’ll be running a live mid-century kitchen clinic on January 14th, and if you register early, you can sign up for just $49.

I’m gonna be walking you through a micro version of the master plan process and helping everyone who shows up for the class go step by step through the process of the master plan for their own kitchen. That’s you, the process for your own kitchen in real time during the two hour class. So I think you should sign up for it and I hope I’ll see you there in January. But right now we’re talking about bigger picture concepts and how to go easy on yourself. So here’s the next thing I would say. If you’re frustrated with your progress for any reason right now or in the future and you wanna get started, one of the kind things you can do for yourself is to make a little hole in your schedule to really focus on it. Rather than trying to do it all in a big chunk in a weekend.

Just give yourself 15 minutes a week for a year, which you can do, even if it’s slow. Even if you only have 15 minutes a week for the next year or 15 minutes a morning or an hour every weekend. Something consistent, something that’s more likely to work rather than something that’s ideal. This can start you onto the catalytic process of going further, of having ideas. So that sense of being able to do something one day and then the next day or the day right after that, come back to the same question, that’s a powerful experience. So how does this apply to you? If you’re holding yourself to a very rigid schedule and planning model, you can feel stuck. Just give yourself a little more Grace A. Little more time. I highly recommend that it is helpful if you can give yourself a bigger chunk of time. Occasionally, if you can batch two days in a row with a bigger session, you might find you have some more opportunities for breakthrough.

But wherever you are, take however little time you have and do that you’re right on schedule by beginning the planning process. Or if you’re in it by picking it up again and starting again, you’re better off than everyone else. Who’s waiting for the ideal time to get started? Now let’s talk about how you can use whatever quantity of new year fresh energy you might feel at the beginning of the year. I’m a little leery of New Year’s resolutions and big goals for how this year will be different from every year before because I think that’s not really how our human brains work.

In my life and in my business, I’m a big believer in quarterly planning. This is a concept that’s been around for a couple of years. You’ve probably encountered it before. The 12 week year quarterly project plans, quarterly metrics and business in my business and my life.

I find that that New Year’s energy has a tendency to come up really fast and burn out just as quickly before January is gone. But if I focus my sights on something a little closer, a goal that’s far enough out to really make some changes, but close enough that I can really stay on track for that amount of time. 13 weeks, a quarter of the year is a nice one. So it might be fun rather to think about what you’re gonna do in 2023 to think about what balls you’re gonna get rolling, what projects you’re gonna start with, thinking you’re gonna do in quarter number one. 

So still I recommend you go easy on yourself as you set your dreams, wishes, goals, and plans for even that quarter. Perhaps you scale down a little bit in specificity as you go through those four things I just said, dreams, wishes, goals and plans.

Actually let’s talk about how you can use each of those modes of thought to your best advantage. And when you’re dreaming, dream big, dream about where you’d like to be in your home a year from now. But don’t hang on to like that means this day in December, 2023, uh, let a year from now be a little bit more of of a nebulous item. Dream about where you’d like to be in your home when it’s ready or dream about where you’d like to be in your home the next time some other regular event pops up.

Now when you’re thinking a little smaller a wish, a wishlist can be more specific. In some cases, a wishlist is almost like a checklist of things, areas you’d like to improve about your home and your life. Feelings like you’d, you’d like to have daily rhythms, you’d like to experience new routines, you’d like to implement maintenance projects to check off a shift in the layout or style of your home you’d like to encompass in the next period of time for goals, you can get even more specific.

It’s for a goal that’s sometimes easier to talk more about what you’d like to set in motion than things you’d like to finish. I really like a habit goal rather than an accomplishment goal. The habit goal of I’m gonna sit down with my coffee and a notebook and write down one thing I want for my house to change every day. That’s something that might actually happen. 

A big ambitious goal is great, but even if you’ve got a big goal in mind, it needs to be broken down into more bite sized pieces and that’s where planning comes into it. Plans are what you’re gonna take on next and if any of the last three things we talked about, your dreams, your wishes, your goals have to do with making substantial or even tweak level changes to your home that I hope your plans include getting serious about doing something to start the planning of your remodel.

So perhaps you listened to the episode from earlier in December about using the holidays to notice things you’d like to improve about your home. And you’ve already begun the process of planning your home update. You have that thinking about what you’d like to change. That’s planning. Hooray, you’ve started. 

If not, that’s all right too because this here is the pep talk part of today’s episode. Wherever you are in your home remodel process, you’re already doing better than people who haven’t started. Or even if you have not yet begun any meaningful planning, you’re in the right place right now. You’re listening to this episode, you’re taking a mental step towards a better home next year. I would argue that everyone I just listed is better off than those folks who are grumbling about how they wish their home were bigger. They wish their kitchen were brighter, they wish they had more storage space, an extra bedroom, a style update, but never even beginning.

So when you go through your remodel planning process, whether you go through it at a speed run or a sedate stroll, you’re doing it the right way for you. And I don’t want you to let the feeling of ugh, I’m doing it wrong, stop you from doing it all. Alright, here’s a little practical tip. You have good ideas for your home. You do. Where were you when you had the last one when you realized you need more light in the morning in your kitchen? That’s the thing. When you decided what to buy for the house that you now love more than anything else, when you just picked a color and got started or when you realized that the first project you need to tackle on your house is the deck. Maybe you were laying in bed in the morning, maybe you were walking the dog, maybe you were doing your dishes with your hands in the sudsy water.

I suspect that there is a place and a time in your daily life when you have good ideas for your home. And if you can identify that, you can capitalize on it, you can catch those ideas. So try to make a little more time in that time. Or if you already have plenty, just set yourself up to catch those ideas as they come by you. For me, this is the dog park. I have great ideas when I’m walking. I have ideas about this podcast, ideas for my clients’ design and ideas for my own home when I’m walking Roxy at Prairie Marine Dog Park and rain or shine, uh, a nice weather or a day like today when I have to keep my phone stuck inside several layers of clothing so it doesn’t freeze. Sidebar, why are iPhones such whiny little California wimps about winter? Okay, that’s just me complaining.

You can use that time, that rhythm in your life to catch those ideas you’re already having. So buy a notepad and keep it by your bed. Tell Alexa your good ideas while you wash the dishes or set up a Google Doc in your phone and use the voice transcription to verbally jot down what you’re thinking while you walk. This is what I do. You will not regret this. Oh, okay. There’s one more step, and that’s after you’ve captured these good ideas, you have to go back and look at them again and categorize them and put them into their places for reuse. This is a lot like you should always just save a pretty Instagram photo. When it’s inspiring, you put it right into a saved folder, but then you have to go back and put it onto a Pinterest board and properly categorize it. If you wanna know more about that, check out episode 6 0 5, the mid mod remodel podcast, um, for more on organizing your inspiration thoughts for easy use later. All right, with that practical tip outta the way, I wanna leave you with this more philosophical concept.

When you think about how you would like to plan your home, look at it this way. One of the things I tell people about the remodel they’re planning about the changes they’re making to their home is that they wanna make their house into a home that helps them live the life they want to live. You wanna make your house into a home that helps you live the life you want to live in it. Great. So here’s the thing, why shouldn’t your remodel planning process also be as close as possible to the life you want to live? Now, it’s clearly a little unreasonable to say, um, I want this transitional moment, something as big as moving the walls around on your house. It can’t happen with no muss and no fuss and no stress, but even though any transition point in your life has a little builtin anxiety inherent in it, that’s all right.

Your goal for the planning is to minimize that stress, to reduce the anxiety. What if you just allowed yourself to kindly take it at your own pace, get the help you need, smooth out the process. There’s no prize for planning your remodel entirely on your own. Whatever methods you can use to make the remodel planning easier, I want to help you do that. But basically, I just want you to start, I want this to be the year when you put the wheels in motion and get started on planning. All right? I was talking to you at the top of the episode about how, how my life looks a little different from Kendra Adachi’s. Here’s a little bit more about me. I was raised culturally, but not religiously Christian. My dad is a lapsed Catholic and my mom is a somewhat resentful Protestant preacher’s kid. Uh, so both of them were kind of anti organized religion, but unable to give up the music they were raised with.

So we sang a lot of Christmas carols in my house, when I was growing up, gathered around the piano with that Tommy de Paula book of Christmas carols. We’d sing Hark the Herald Angels sing, the Holly and the Ivy, God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen, just a lot. And one of my favorite sentiments out of all of that polyglot of multicultural mishmash that forms the Christmas Carol Cannon is the concept of tidings of comfort and joy.

Comfort and joy is such a wonderful thing to wish to someone. Comfort and joy together are an amazing combination because joy is magic. We wanna feel it as often as possible. But gout getting too philosophical here, you can’t feel a constant stream of joy. If you did, it wouldn’t feel like joy. Joy is special. It’s unique. It stands out, but comfort, comfort is something we can strive for in as many minutes of the day as possible.

So you put those two together and you’ve got a pretty good combination. I think Christmas, we’re talking about this right now, a few days before Christmas. It’s just one day. It’s just one season of the year. It’s soon gonna be in the rear view mirror. But what I want you to take beyond December 25th is apply the philosophical idea of comfort and joy to your home, to your remodel planning process. Is this nuts? Is anyone with me here <laugh>? If you are, hey, send me a DM on Instagram and tell me you’d like a comfortable and joyful remodel. I would love to hear that that’s true. Basically, just go easy on yourself.

Reminder, a couple of easy ways to start are to take the advice from episode 10 0 9 and use this actual holiday to start identifying what matters to you. Or go take any free hour you have and check out my free masterclass How to Plan a Mid-century Remodel to Fit Your Life and Budget. Or mark your calendar for January 14th and plan to show up ready to plan a kitchen tweak or transformation for your mid-century home at the Mid-Century Kitchen Clinic. Wherever you start, start small. 

If you’re listening to this on Thursday in the Midwest, know that I am currently super excited about this big dump of snow that’s been predicted. But I’ll tell you on Instagram on Thursday, if I’m actually enjoying all the shoveling and in this coming weekend, whether it’s a religious event for you, a family holiday, get together just a lot of mid-century kitchen good music, or if it’s just a season of the year when everyone in America takes a couple of days off at the same time, which is kind of magic. I wish for you, comfort and joy now and in your New year remodel planning.

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