Can you picture it? Sure you can. We’ve all seen some really scary remodeling choices —on Zillow, on Instagram, or sadly, maybe even in our own homes.
You can file this under schadenfreude if none of it applies to your house. Or it can serve as a what not to do guide to help you avoid mistakes. If you’re already living one of the nightmare mid-century remodel scenarios I’m about to describe, then let’s focus on the fact that you’re far from alone.
AND there’s hope!
I really believe that a good, solid master plan can bring any mid-century house back from the brink of horror.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
A Bad Dream: The Replace-in-Place Kitchen
The most common “nightmare” is a replace-in-place remodel.
This is typically a kitchen or bathroom that was updated in the 80s or 90s or 2000’s. BUT the previous owner made a critical mistake.
They replaced the original mid-century cabinetry and fixtures with newer (often worse) cabinets in exactly the same footprint and layout.
We know that original 1950s kitchens were often “housewife focused” spaces with lots of limitations for many of today’s modern families—no social space, not enough storage, and a one person layout that does not work for multiple cooks.
It’s … less of a tragedy and more of a wasted opportunity.
Let’s assume the cabinetry and other finishes really did need replacement after 40-50 years of service. Okay. Then while you’re at it, take the opportunity to make it all work better for modern inhabitants!
The upside of this one is it’s relatively easy to wake up from a bad dream.
The charm is already gone, leaving you with the freedom to create a layout customized to your modern life without feeling precious about destroying the original kitchen.
The Stress Dream: Careless DIY Disasters
Escalating the horror, we get into careless DIY projects that destroy houses because they are done badly. These aren’t just aesthetic blunders. They are structural and safety issues.
The most egregious examples involve badly executed plumbing and electrical work, which have the potential to become actively dangerous.
Imagine a poorly installed toilet that slowly leaks sewage water into the subfloor for a decade, soaking the material underneath. That is exactly what my sister found in her bathroom. EEEKKKK!!!
Moves like installing new flooring over old carpet (WHAT the WHAT?), gluing vinyl over original hardwood (that bell can’t be unrung) or carpet in the kitchen/bathroom are just bewildering.
If you’re house-hunting or feeling uncertain, a careful home inspection is your best defense against having to eliminate these gross, hidden repairs.
The Sad Nightmare: The Destruction of Character
For those of us who appreciate mid-century character, the saddest nightmare is the general destruction of a time capsule house.
This is most often seen in flips: a house is bought, stripped of its original features, and then put almost immediately back on the market. The tragic choices include painting original brick (please, if you haven’t yet, just don’t!) ) and sending original doors, trim, and millwork to the landfill.
Most mid-century woodwork is truly priceless, made of stuff that no longer exists.
You can exorcise the bad choices…and the Master Plan Method is your secret weapon.
A house stripped of its character is not the end of the line. If you don’t believe me, check out my recent interview with the Unflipping folks!
Just like them, you get to tune your house to your favorite mid-century moment. Maybe you want to take this opportunity to lean your house away from “Leave it to Beaver” and toward “later Brady Bunch”.
And you now have the freedom to make major layout changes—like opening up the kitchen to the dining room—without worrying about destroying something original. So … it can be a real win win!
Looking for the right place to start putting back mid-century style with each little project or minor repair? You want to begin with my SIMPLE Style Guide system. Grab the workbook and get started right here!
To really reanimate a flipped mid-century house, you’re going to need more than just one or two substitutions. You need a comprehensive, strategic approach. This is where the Master Plan Method comes in.
You create your Master Plan by answering the right questions for yourself and your house, then discovering where things actually stand, and setting a style you’ll love that also feels true to your home’s era.
Now you have a big picture vision for the whole house. And you’ll feel confident taking a big swing at a major contractor remodel as soon as you can afford and organize for it. Or maybe just setting up and knocking down a series of smaller projects, one after another that will still feel coherent and consistent because you’ve got your style guide set and your Master Plan vision in place.
Listen Now On
Resources
- Need some help setting YOUR mid-century style? Grab my newly updated mini-course More than a Moodboard right here!
- Get Ready to Remodel, my course that teaches you to DIY a great plan for your mid mod remodel!
- Want us to create your mid-century master plan? Apply here to get on my calendar for a Discovery Call!
- Need some targeted home advice? Schedule a 30-minute Zoom consult with me. We’ll dig into an issue or do a comprehensive mid century house audit.
And you can always…
- Join us in the Facebook Community for Mid Mod Remodel
- Find me on Instagram:@midmodmidwest
- Find the podcast on Instagram: @midmodremodelpodcast
Read the Full Episode Transcript
00:01
In honor of spooky season, let’s talk nightmare mid-century remodel scenarios. Can you picture it? We’ve seen them in person and all over Zillow. So you can file this under schadenfreude if none of it applies to your house, or it can serve as a what not to do guide to help you avoid mistakes. If you’re already living one of the nightmare mid-century remodel scenarios I’m about to describe, then let’s focus on the fact that you’re far from alone. And I really believe that a good, solid master plan can bring any mid-century house back from the brink of horror.
00:29
Today, we’re talking scary scenarios ranging from mild, an out of place, remodeled kitchen from the 90s to the shocking a DIY installed toilet slowly leaching sewage into a subfloor for decade to the current 2025 trend. That gives me a shudder every time I see it. Hey there. Welcome back to mid model remodel. This is the show about updating MCM homes, helping you match a mid-century home to your modern life and your host, della Hansmann, architect and mid-century ranch enthusiast. You’re listening to Episode 2214.
00:59
Happy spooky season to those who celebrate. I have seen mid-century Instagram absolutely lighting up with people sprinkling pumpkins and witch hat decor all around their vintage shelf displays and mantle arrangements. Maybe I’ll do a roundup of fun design ideas over on Insta today. Shoot me links to your favorite examples of Halloween decorating or photos of what you’ve done yourself. I’d love to see them.
01:24
I think we are officially kicking off what we could term the holiday season. Thanksgiving is really not that far away. And then the winter holidays, Christmas Solstice, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, coming right up after that, like a freight taint. So basically, we are staring down the end of 2025 I don’t know about you, but I’m sort of looking I’m hoping for next year to be better. But if you are hoping to make improvements to your house in 2026 then I want to encourage you to start the process of Master Plan thinking sooner rather than later.
01:56
The sooner you get started on making plans, the more chill the planning process can be. So if you’re looking to work with mid modern Midwest, if you’d like us to prepare a mid-century master plan for your house, now is a great time to have a conversation before the holidays really take off. You could drop all of your design thinking on me and my team and leave it to cook with us. Then go about your celebrations, and in January, get back a master plan ready to share with contractors.
02:24
Or if you do think that you might want to use some of the longer evenings and internal time to think about your own DIY remodel plans, then ready to remodel is a program always waiting with open arms to guide you through the process of DIYing a master plan for yourself, and the time to get started on plans for next year really is right now. So that’s there. I would love to hold your hand and walk with you through the process of a mid-century master plan, the kind of vision for your house that can help you avoid the nightmare mid-century remodeling scenarios that I’m about to describe. All right. Grab show notes for the transcript, any links I’m going to mention in the show coming up, and anything else you want on my website at mid mod, dash, midwest.com/ 2214, let’s get into it.
03:14
So I think the term nightmare, I’m applying it loosely, and by the way, I’m talking here about nightmare outcomes for mid-century homes, things we could see have already happened to a house on Zillow. If you want to think about unfortunate processes or even mistakes that can be made, I’m actually going to point you to my true confessions of my own mistakes and regrets about my own mid-century home.
03:40
And also, I think you’ll find that these completely apply to common mid-century remodeling regrets. These lessons are more along the lines of things that I didn’t do quickly enough. So I lived for years with ugly green wall to wall carpet covering my beautiful hardwood floors, and once I finally ripped it up, the relief was immediate. Why did I wait so long, or the projects that are still unfinished? Ooh, the clock is basically ticking since I stopped doing any DIY whatsoever in the pandemic and just haven’t come back to it as my business completely took over my consciousness.
04:15
So if you’re stuck in one of those situations, you’ll find my sympathies there, and you’ll also hear my regrets around some of the choices I made too soon, not having done enough careful Master Plan thinking I found that me and just about everybody else I’ve ever spoken to, who has dove, dived right in, dove right in, who dove right in on their remodel projects without taking time to think, What does mid-century mean to me? What is my overall goal for this house? Has a regret about their first project, sometimes a big regret.
04:38
So that actually leads us right into some of the nightmare remodels for mid-century homes. You may be the person responsible for one of the nightmare scenarios I’m about to list, or it’s possible that the person who. Who did that work? Regretted it after the fact. But anyway, if you wanted to hear my true confessions, an architect remodeling regret that episode came about a year ago, October 17, 2024, and you will find it at midmod-midwest.com/1902.
05:15
But today we’re talking about nightmare outcomes, the things you would see someone who cares about mid-century like you and I do posting in a oh my god, you won’t believe this tragedy reel on Instagram or sending you a terrible Zilla link just to watch you wince. These things are, this is, I think doctors spend a lot of time having people sidle up to them at parties and ask them weird medical questions or tell them medical horror stories.
05:46
And people who love mid-century, particularly architects who specialize in mid-century, hear a lot of, oh my god, you won’t believe what just happened to this house down the block stories. If your friends and family know how much you love mid-century, they may be bringing you these stories as well. So I’m going to just kind of take these in a range from the sort of bad dream level. Is it a nightmare when the kitchen is just remodeled into a different era of the house? Maybe not.
06:09
Leveling up to recurring stress dreams about the kind of careless DIY projects that destroy houses because they’re done badly, or the general destruction of mid-century character painting brick, removing cool built ins to the particularly bad remodel ideas that trended in past decades that we can now see things like carpet in the bathroom, carpet in the kitchen, carpet. You know what carpet? Let’s just say that carpet in a mid-century house that is not a rug is one of my recurring stress dreams.
06:41
And then we’re gonna get into the truly heinous stuff, trying to turn a mid-century house into something it’s not the mid-century house has Tuscan villa. I’m gonna save my truly, my personal, truly most horrific mid-century house nightmare, actually, my universal remodel nightmare for the end of the episode. I’m not going to spoil on it now, because, well, you got to save something for the end.
07:05
I’m going to start with one of the most common. Can I even call it a nightmare? It’s a bad dream. It’s a bad dream. We have way too often in mid-century houses, which is just that the remodels done in the past are both inappropriate for the mid-century era of the house, but also it’s a whatever the opposite of a two for one is, because I see this again and again and again, particularly in kitchens, but also in bathrooms, someone will have come in replaced all the original mid-century cabinetry and features with newer cabinets and features new appliances, new plumbing fixtures, new vanities, new kitchen built ins in exactly the same footprint and layout as was there before.
07:51
So as much as I love mid-century homes, as much as I am constantly advocating for preserving what we’ve got in mid-century homes, mid-century kitchens and bathrooms are not always necessarily up to modern standards. They’re not customized to fit your lifestyle. They’re a very one size fits all undertaking and so coming in and actually just putting in an 80s kitchen in the exact shape of a builder basic mid-century kitchen, means you’ve got all the downsides of this sort of housewife focused only one person can effectively work in here.
08:25
There’s no social space, there’s not enough pantry storage. There’s a lot of upper cabinets and lower cabinets with just doors and no drawers. All of the same flaws of the original kitchen are being replicated in particle board materials that are going to break down sooner and faster. All of the original appliances are being tossed, have been tossed, are landfilled for decades, decades ago now, and yet what they were replaced with is something that’s functionally the same, except less good.
08:52
This is sort of the thing that feels like when I have dreams about a conversation that didn’t go well, and it just I can’t get it get it better, no matter how many times I go around on it. So if this is probably a scenario you’ve encountered in your own home, in a home of a friend of yours, because the replace in place remodel is the most common type of remodel that happens, Kitchen and Bathrooms are deemed out of style, and someone just goes to a local contractor or the sort of takes their layout to the big box store and orders exactly the same things, carefully measuring the cabinet box widths and replacing an old one with a new one.
09:34
So in the scheme of how bad is this? It’s not devastating for the house. It’s a wasted opportunity. But depending on how old that replace in place remodel was, if it’s from the 80s, well, that’s coming up on 45 years ago. Now we can go ahead and call that remodel. Probably it’s failing for folks I’ve spoken to who are living in 80s kitchens. I often. Hear stories of like the surfaces feel icky and uncleanable. The interior materials are starting to fail. It’s pretty obvious, at least it’s clear that you need to do something about it. And so there is a window of opportunity. Let’s This is a nightmare we can wake up from.
10:16
In some cases, it gives you the freedom of not having to feel precious about the original kitchen or the original bathroom being there. You don’t have to worry that you are the person who is breaking the eggs in order to make an omelet. The eggs are broken, so let’s get cooking. So that’s I think that sort of falls into the category of like, Yeah, that happens all the time. It’s just your slightly disturbing, weird dream that you need to wake up from.
10:39
The next category of nightmare mid-century remodel is actually just a nightmare remodel in general. And this is something I’ve heard client after student after friend tell me about, and luckily, I didn’t experience it too much in my own home, only because not very much had been done to my own home, but the poorly done DIY projects of past owners, the most egregious example I can think of is my own little sister’s house.
11:07
The previous owner on that house was a very enthusiastic DIY er who modified or touched or replaced or added on to most of the parts of the house, and her work in that house has been to slowly but clearly, redo every single thing that was done by the previous owner, because they are all done very badly. Maybe the most disgusting nightmare scenario in that house is that a toilet on the main floor was poorly installed and leaked at the seal. And so underneath they could see that the linoleum in the bathroom, again, linoleum in the bathroom, what a choice was bubbling and slightly discolored.
11:51
And when they ended up getting it up, they found that the entire subfloor was soaked through with the evidence of slowly leaking water over the years, that water was leaking out of the toilet, so sewage water slowly titrating through the sub floor of their home for years. Absolutely disgusting. But this happens all over the place, just people. I don’t again. I don’t mean this as a discouragement for you to DIY projects on your house if you want to think them through carefully.
12:25
We have such good resources these days, books, advice guides on the internet, YouTube videos of talented, competent remodelers, showing you exactly, step by step, how they go about doing something. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t still sometimes think of some work as being farm outable to an expert, and that you shouldn’t certainly have all of your work properly inspected by whatever municipal authority there is on hand, so that you don’t end up doing things like poorly seating the toilet that you’re reinstalling such that sewage water will soak into the subfloor for a decade.
13:00
But then there’s also just the like, kooky ideas that have nothing to do with code or safety or even sewage sludge, but are just what were they thinking moves? Flooring installed over carpet? What the What? Carpet in places you shouldn’t see it. Carpet in the bathroom, carpet in the kitchen, carpet, yeah, I would argue this falls into the category of, well, in most cases, carpet put over hardwood floors by our Boomer forebears in their mid-century homes actually did a nice job of preserving the hardwood from fade, from spill, from wear and tear, so that can be a really nice feature.
13:43
But on the other hand, you’ll sometimes see that people will just glue down a vinyl surface over Original hardwood, and there’s nothing you can do. You can’t get it back off again. There’s no There’s no unringing That bell. So the poorly thought out projects and the poorly carried out projects that create significant damage and have to be addressed. That’s a nightmare remodeling scenario.
14:07
And so this is something you when you are looking at a new home. If anybody listening is in the process of a house search, a careful home inspection is going to help you out with catching some of these things. And if you’re thinking about your house right now, you probably you should have a house inspection report from the time of purchase, or you might need to get a new one. Anytime you feel like you’re just not sure what the state of your house is right now and ask the inspector if they can suss out any weird looking or poorly executed DIY projects of the past. Badly executed plumbing and electrical work is probably the most actually dangerous scenario there.
14:43
But there may also be areas that weren’t insulated properly, weren’t put together structurally properly, yeah, just any kind of bad repair work done by a previous owner is something that you should regard as suspect and try to eliminate that nightmare scenario by. Are readdressing anything in that category as soon as you can. For those of us who truly have grown to love and appreciate mid-century character, there’s what I was just talking about, the kind of nightmare where you wake up feeling alarmed and grossed out.
15:16
And then there’s the kind of nightmare where you wake up feeling sad. This is the category of general destruction of mid-century character. And it’s actually the most sad, I think, in this moment when we can sometimes go and see like you can see the Google Drive by photos of a house going back well over a decade at this point. And you can likewise see sometimes Zillow photos from the previous sale and then the new one. So you can watch in real time, even without knowing anyone inside the house, even without ever having been to an open house or anything, you can see the loss of mid-century character as houses come on and off the market.
15:53
This is particularly tragic to me in the case of flips. If someone buys a house, owns a home, lives in a home, makes it their own, and they end up painting the brick painting, the siding painting the original wood materials, landfilling the original doors and trim and putting in fake six panels that that hurts me. It makes me sad for them, but I’m going to at least give them the dignity of perhaps they did enjoy that. Perhaps I would call it misguided, but perhaps they made that choice and appreciate it while they were living with it.
16:28
But when someone buys a time capsule mid-century house goes in and rips out all the mid-century character and then puts it back on the market, 123, years later, that is the kind of nightmare I wake up from mad? And actually, that is not the kind of nightmare I wake up from, because you don’t wake up painting the brick, as we’ve talked about again and again, including on last week’s episode, is one of those choices that can’t really be unmade. It is possible, with a great deal of labor and elbow grease to get the paint off of brick on an interior surface, it’s more plausible not to cause major structural damage, but it sometimes isn’t possible to get the paint back off of brick, and it is incredibly expensive and sometimes damaging.
17:16
You’re not going to get it back the way it was before, in all likelihood. So the same with once you’ve torn off all the original doors and trim and thrown them in a landfill and put in cheap, primed Home Depot trim and fake six panel doors, you’ve lost something. You’ve lost original wood grain, you’re not gonna get back or, you know, as we talked about in the unflipping episode just two or three weeks ago, you can take off and landfill the replacement doors and trim and put on new slab doors and new trim. It’s just, it’s a frustrating cycle of waste that really, really grinds my gears. And I’m sure that you feel the same way.
18:03
So this is the sort of thing where, like, if you know anyone who’s contemplating this kind of mistake, please stop them, stand in front of the trucks and try to prevent this kind of devastating loss of mid-century character from happening, because we can put back a lot. You know, I’m going to talk actually. Let’s just take a moment to focus on the positive. Because where can you begin if you’re facing this, if you are living in a house where someone else came in and made a whole bunch of flipper choices.
18:33
They painted the brick white. They replaced the entire kitchen with a new kitchen in the same layout. They put in new ornate crown molding, white painted everything and fake panel doors. What do you do? This isn’t the kind of thing where one or two level one purchase remodel projects are going to fix the problem. You are going to need to have a comprehensive approach. And over time if you want to remedy this, if you want to restore this nightmare mid-century remodel scenario, you’re going to need to redo almost all of the work that’s been done.
19:10
You’re going to need to take off the fake six panel doors and invest in new slab doors. And you’re going to need to research stain. You’re going to need to do all of the things that the unflipping folks have talked about doing and they are loving this project, and the outcome is phenomenal, but it’s their full time hobby. It’s been their passion project for the last five years, and they’re not done yet. So it is a lot of work to bring mid-century character back. I tend to be a remodeling optimist, though, and I do think that there is an upside. You can do whatever you need to do, because there is some yes, you can energy around the prospect of unflipping.
19:51
And there’s also the possibility to change layouts in ways that you might feel more hesitant to do if you had more of an original time capsule house you might feel that you didn’t want. To lose the you might didn’t want to choose to destroy mid-century character yourself, to open up space between a kitchen and a dining room, or a kitchen and a living room, you might not want to think about making major shifts in reorienting spaces in bedrooms or bathrooms, to push out to the back of the house to get other connections, because you didn’t want to lose something that was original.
20:18
When you’re dealing with a house that’s been pretty aggressively flipped, you have more freedom to make changes without losing anything. So that is definitely a silver lining to the scenario. Now, if you are starting from there, like I say, one or two substitutions is not going to solve this problem, so you are going to be needing to be really strategic about your choices going forward, this could mean taking on an all at once comprehensive remodel of the entire house, but that is a challenging prospect to take on. Not everyone is in a position to take that on.
20:55
And you know, we got a lovely example again, from the dear unflipping folks. They’re not doing a everything at once remodel scenario. They’re taking an approach that’s very similar to what I recommend, which is they have a style in mind. They have a vision in mind of where they’re going, and they’re now knocking off projects one at a time for themselves. They’re kind of doing it in the order of what feels most urgent and most appealing to them to tackle next, but they’ve got a big picture plan, and this is what you’ll need as well when your house has been comprehensively flipped and stripped of mid-century character.
21:25
If that’s your nightmare, then you’re looking for a style guide approach. I teach this in my ready to remodel program, and I do this for my master plan clients, but you can walk yourself through the same process by following the style guide system, and you’ll begin exactly the same way that someone living in a time capsule house would, by asking yourself some key questions about your own personal remodeling preferences, your mid-century remodeling preferences.
21:52
What’s your favorite moment from the mid-century era? Is it early 1950s twee, or is it maybe a bit more groovy 60s, leaning all the way into the 70s, maybe your heart beats for a more organic modern style with wood finishes and terracotta tile and cream colored plaster, sort of Frank Lloyd Wright-ish, Usonian-ish, if any of those things ring true, or whichever one of those is right for you, that’s going to inform the style guide that you build over time.
22:18
And you’re also going to want to think about whether you are looking for something that is putting back, a true attempt at a time capsule set of choices, or you’re looking to do an update that feels timeless, so you’re thinking about the materials of the mid-century, but not necessarily the shapes, or you’re looking for a certain proportion of the house to be restored to a mid-century feeling, but not Going back to create an I live in a museum effect. Knowing the answers to those questions is the jumping off point of setting a style guide for yourself. Then you can take it further.
22:50
There are fun processes to make it easier to share your ideas with other people, like giving your style a nickname Palm Springs, but more Flintstones than Jetsons. Or we want this to be more Bond villain, less Brady Bunch. When you have a jaunty, a clever, a clearly descriptive nickname, maybe you’re picking on a TV show or a movie or a famous architectural icon, you can then communicate what you’re looking for to yourself, to your partner and to people that you’re going to work with to help make this happen.
23:22
As you go forward, you will find yourself going through the classic remodeling Pinterest process, but you’re not going to be able to find what you need to sort of cure a mid-century remodel nightmare like a total flip just with one or two pins on Pinterest. Instead, you need to be strategic, gathering your in your inspiration the right way, and ultimately looking more for material palettes rather than somebody else’s picture of a finished house.
23:47
This can be a great place, by the way, to look to inspiration from other homeowners going through an unflipping process, like the unflipping Instagram account itself. But there are others, and finding those kind of real world scenarios, rather than a published, finished magazine product, is going to give you more of a sense of the reality of it, the complexity of it, and someone you could reach out to and send a questioning DM to if you wanted to, eventually you’ll boy down, boil down your ideas from cool image or cool account you follow to a specific set of material choices that will be right to meet the moment in your house.
24:25
The right wood grain and stain, the right kind of metal that will show up again and again in light fixtures, handles, hardware, the right colors. Here’s a hot tip on that one, by the way, if you struggle to identify colors that you think work nicely together, it can be a nice shortcut to choose something that some talented designer put together, a piece of art, or a piece of multicolored designed furniture fabric so an art print, an area rug with multiple colors in it, a colorway for a set of appliances.
24:58
Or, you know, look at Mod box mailboxes and a bunch of their different mailbox colors actually all look really cute together, even though you’re meant to only pick one main color. Any other design team that’s focused on mid-century that’s put together an array of colors, you can feel free to borrow from that. Anyway. I know a lot of people struggle with what is the particular perfect shade.
25:17
Once you’ve got a color scheme in mind, you can take that to the paint store and have them give you the precise color match for that. You can move along from there. But as you start to test then, once you’ve got your sort of image library of materials assembled, you’re going to start to test real world products together, bringing them into the house.
25:34
Now this is a place where, if you’re not doing your remodel all at once, you will create some clashing moments between the horrible nightmare scenario flip and the new materials you’re bringing in. But as long as you’ve got your style guide in mind, as long as you’re moving towards a goal, I think you’ll start to find it more and more soothing to see the contrast tip in the balance from what it had been to what it will be, and it will build in a snowball effect towards the satisfying thing you’re looking for.
26:02
Eventually you’ve got a spreadsheet that is filled with the actual products you have already selected, so that once you’ve done one room, you’ve got the hardware link, price source listed, so you can go ahead and buy it again for the next room you do and the next each renovation project you take on in your house becomes a rinse and repeat and gets easier and easier and easier to take on.
26:21
So like I say, if you’re dealing with the nightmare mid-century remodel scenario of the whole house has been flipped into modern cottage 10 years ago or into any other era, there’s a strategy you can follow. You can develop a simple style guide for your home and then use it to guide you like breadcrumbs out of the forest. And finally, find your way back to a mid-century appropriate palette for your house that gets built in room by room, little project by little project or big project, when you can to bring the house back to its mid-century roots and take it out of the nightmare. If this is making you feel hopeful.
27:02
But you want some help to follow the simple style guide process, then I will link to the mini course that I have on that subject. Take you through each of the steps I just listed with examples and guides on the show notes page for this episode. Go check it out there.
27:16
All right, let’s, let’s turn up the nightmare. Yeah, I think the most frustrating to me is the general destruction of mid-century character, which can feel most wanton and meaningless, sort of fruitlessly violent, when it’s just done by someone who is taking a house they don’t appreciate and trying to jam some not even some niceness, I think.
27:40
I don’t think any flipper who takes out original mid-century stuff and replaces with Home Depot standard thinks they’re making the house better. They just think they’re making it newer. And that is maybe the most, the mentally, the most nightmare scenario for me. But then there are, there are versions of this attitude from every era, every decade since our mid-century houses were built. There has always been someone trying to turn these houses into something they’re not.
28:08
And just applying the trendy style that was in vogue for new build houses in the year that the remodel happened to a mid-century house willy nilly with no reference to the fact that it was designed to live a certain way, look a certain way, carry a certain ethos. I think maybe the weirdest version of this is the mid 90s trend of making your house luxurious by making it feel like a Tuscan villa. And that was a strange sell for even a new, sort of a fakey new build.
28:43
From that time period, I remember growing up in the north suburbs of Chicago, there was a big marketing push for a large new development that was going into cornfield, you know, greenfield development on the edge of town. What was it called? Something landing, Greg’s landing, your private sanctuary. And all of the houses were sort of vaguely Tuscan villa on the inside; they were also incredibly poorly constructed.
Friend of mine moved into one of those houses with her parents when we were in high school, and I remember going over to visit her the first time and noticing that the corners weren’t square. And they hadn’t mudded and taped properly. So there was a, on the stairwell, there was a corner that I looked up, and I could see that just the place where three wall, two walls and a ceiling came together, there was a little black gap going into unfinished space beyond. Really, really just shocked me.
29:39
But there was this moment when Tuscan villa, what was there was a movie that came out around that time, and everybody just thought that was the epitome of luxury, the sort of hand painted tile and rag painted walls and distressed furniture. Crackle Paint was a thing. Thing, yeah, and putting that into a mid-century house, taking this sort of minimalist, practical cool factor of a mid-century ranch, and trying to pretend that it was neoclassical ruins, but in a casual way, with lavender in the yard outside. Just so strange, just absolutely bizarre.
30:20
How did they think that was going to pull off? So that’s, that’s the sort of dream I wake up from and go, huh? And at this point, that idea, even though they were only happening 30-ish years ago, 1995 I would argue, was maybe the height of the Tuscan Villa moment. You don’t actually see that many Tuscan Villa style kitchens anymore, because it was so clearly weird, so immediately after it went off trend that it’s mostly been turned into other things since that time. If you know anyone who’s still living with a Tuscan Villa kitchen, or you are, reach out and let me know. I’m curious to know if maybe this is happening and it’s just invisible to me.
31:01
All right, let’s move on to something a little bit more creepy to me. The real creep factor nightmare mid-century remodel scenario is replacing mid-century wood, anything with vinyl, anything. This is a nightmare that’s insidious. It’s a nightmare that’s frustrating because it’s such a half ass choice that feels so expensive to replace once it’s done, it’s a it’s someone who decided to make a cheap choice because they didn’t want to pay for more expensive one.
31:33
And now that they’ve made it, it’s harder for anyone in the future to choose to make it again, because there’s something that works, there’s something that exists. It’s not obviously failing, and so it’s hard to take out something that’s functional but ugly or functional but low quality, and replace it with something else, purely because you don’t like the esthetic of it or the effect of it, although, I would argue, actually, a lot of these choices vinyl siding, which is billed as a zero maintenance solution or vinyl replacement windows. Vinyl replacement windows have a marketed lifespan of 15 years, on average, five to 25 according to their own marketing. What the What?
32:16
So people are actually agreeing to take out in landfill windows that have been in their house for 75 years, and sure aren’t performing the best right now, but could potentially be maintained and repaired and replace them with something that’s going to last 15 years. This is madness, but at the same time, I often deal with clients, with students, with folks who tell me, yeah, we’re not going to be replacing the windows, because they were just replaced five years ago, right before we bought the house. Yes, they’re vinyl, so we can’t change the color. So we have, you know, white vinyl exterior window frames and trim on the outside of the house. Now what can we do esthetically to work with that?
32:58
And of course, I do my team, and I will do everything we can to help you make choices around your house to work with the existing conditions the choices that have been made in the past. It’s easier to feel like, what a fool that person was that made that choice when it was the previous owner.
But I have also, I don’t mean this to be an accusation, a lot of my clients made that choice themselves. They moved into a house, got an inspector’s checklist of windows are single pane might need replacing, called a window company got quoted a bunch of prices. Found out that replacing every window in a house, you know, and that might be anywhere between 10 to 15 to 20 windows in a house, the cost of a window each going up from vinyl windows being the baseline, going up from there through several product lines. And just decided, okay, we need to replace the windows.
33:49
It’s a mature, responsible thing to do, but we are trying to be budget friendly, so we’ll just go with these workmen like vinyl windows. When you’re taking your advice from someone who’s selling you something, they’ll be happy to sell you anything in their product line, low to high, without really debating with you the relative merits of those things. This is why I constantly advise people to check with an independent authority, and if you’re dealing with replacement windows, again, I’ve done a whole episode on why you might not want to replace your mid-century windows, check with a glazier, someone who repairs windows before you speak to someone who only replaces Windows about whether or not your windows need to be replaced.
34:26
But when you’ve made this choice yourself, it’s even more of a nightmare, because a few years down the line, you may find yourself really regretting it. And again, I’m not going to tell you that you should tear out windows you yourself have already replaced and replace them again.
This is sometimes a bridge too far, which is why it’s such an insidious nightmare mid-century remodeling scenario. But we’ll work with that choice, or we’ll make a plan again, place it in the style guide. It doesn’t happen to happen this year, but if that window has a 25 year warranty on it, and you’re planning to be in this house until you retire. We’re putting it on your to do list for 20 years from now, to get the windows replaced with something that’s going to have a bit more staying power and lean into the vibe of the house a little more effectively.
35:14
This whole episode feels like a bit of a digression for me, because I spend a lot of time trying not to talk smack about other people’s choices and not to go negative about things that have happened to mid-century houses. There are a lot of really successful Instagram accounts out there, blogs out there that have basically made their name on pointing out bad design choices that other people have made. And we can all look at those and say, oh god. These accounts are sometimes very educational. They’re more often for entertainment value. I get a lot of joy out of following the Instagram account Hello. My name is John, who does little horror tours of terrible Zillow listings and takes you through all the really, really cringe choices that someone made, and then, just like listed their house on Zillow for us all to see and judge.
36:06
Back a couple of years ago, I really enjoyed following a blog called McMansion hell, which pointed out just terrible design choices on very, very expensive McMansion style homes. And I’ve never wanted to do that, because even though I walk through mid-century neighborhoods, cringing and grumping and swearing under my breath about bad choices that other people have made. I would never want to be the person that someone recognizes their own house on my Instagram account and I’m making fun of a terrible choice they made that that is not the kind of energy I want to put into the world.
36:39
I do think it bears noting, though, that some of these choices that are regularly made, that are often made, are really bad choices for mid-century houses. So I’m using this episode as a little bit of an out to point out some of the horrors, and also to hopefully let it land softly. If this is a choice on your own home, if this is a choice you made in the past on your own home. I don’t want you to feel at fault. Absolutely everyone is giving bad advice for mid-century homes, all of the HGTV content, every contractor you speak to is going to tell you to do things like paint your brick and paint your woodwork and tear out your kitchen and replace it and put in new windows.
37:20
If vinyl is all you can afford, then sure go with vinyl. This is a constant drum feed of creating nightmare scenarios for mid-century houses. So I never want anyone to feel like they are foolish or the choices that they made are unfixable. But if you are in a position and listening to this episode, going, Oh God, della I did that to my own house five years ago when I moved in 20 years ago. I talk to people like that all the time, and I don’t want you to feel alone. The next step is to start planning for the future. The next step is to start planning the mid-century master plan that is going to slowly or suddenly bring your house back towards its mid-century roots. There’s always hope for a mid-century house.
38:05
There is no mid-century house, I think, that’s been remodeled so badly that it can’t be pulled back into a mid-century charm. And in some cases, we have the ability to put more mid-century charm into a house than was ever there in the first place. So the good news is there’s nowhere to go but up. All right. I want to wrap up this episode by I’ve talked about bad dreams and weird dreams, and the kind of dream that you like wake up from feeling sad.
This is the one. This is the nightmare mid-century remodel scenario that feels like someone is actually lurking in my bedroom whispering bad things into my ear while I sleep, and it combines a bunch of the above, choices that are wrong for the house, choices that are replacing good things with bad things, painting brick, all of this, and it is the modern white and black, modern farmhouse style that started taking over remodeling trends about five years ago, and honestly, I hated the modern cottage thing, largely because it wasn’t a good fit for mid-century homes.
39:09
Modern cottage came right before modern farmhouse, and there were houses that actually, you know, if you had a 1930s bungalow, modern cottage was not actually a terrible choice to update that house my parents, or if you were starting with a new build, it had an interesting amount of character you could build into something my parents’ home, which I designed for them, and was built by a company that I worked for in my first architecture job out of grad school, has sort of an Eco, modern cottage vibe to it.
39:41
Actually, it’s a timber frame house with a sod roof and straw bale walls, but the interior is all white painted woodwork and brushed nickel hardware, and that is fine for that house. It’s perfect. If I had tried to, I wasn’t a mid-century Stan at that point, and it wouldn’t necessarily. Really have been appropriate for me to try to rebuild a mid-century esthetic into a new build from about 15 years ago. So modern cottage not necessarily a terrible thing, although it frustrates me to see it sort of wallpapered onto mid-century houses, but the modern farmhouse thing feels especially awful to me, it feels worse. It feels so absolutely haunted.
40:26
These houses feel like skeletons of houses. They feel cursed. To me, the bland, sort of harsh white exterior, new siding that’s so sort of razor precision, the new cut materials that feel so harsh, and then even more harsh, all the black details, outlines of trim around every edge, the black window trim, which is so on trend right now, the white painted brick, and knowing that all of the original materials that have been painted white are just going to start to peel and spall in a few years, and that white siding is going to seem so grungy after a little while, and that it’s one of the longest details on a house is the replacement windows when they go in and they put in New windows with black exterior frames and trim that’s we’re gonna be working with that forever.
41:24
So it really, oh God, it feels like, esthetically, a bad choice, and also, it’s so comprehensive in the way that it washes across and then it just feels so soulless to me. What could be worse? I don’t know, reach out and tell me what of the various mid-century remodeled nightmare scenarios I’ve just listed today feels the worst to you, but I have no doubt, to me, the most horrific is the combination of all of them, the painted brick, the new white siding, the replacement windows, all of it in white and black, completely inappropriate for mid-century house, but I don’t like it…anywhere. Total Sam, I am stuff here.
42:06
I was running a medium length route earlier this year, preparing for a half marathon over the summer, and ended up going through my parents’ old neighborhood and closer to downtown Madison, through University Heights, and there’s a beautiful neighborhood of full height oak trees through the space. Ooh. Okay, weird, little Madison history nerd moment. Camp Randall Stadium. Now our current University football stadium was once Camp Randall, where troops from Wisconsin mustered in order to go down and fight in the Civil War.
42:35
And when they were waiting, when they were mustering, everybody was coming from various parts of Wisconsin, before they all marched down and wore their shoes out on the way south. They heated their camp by cutting down the oak trees closest to Camp Randall and burning them for fuel. And so they were cutting and cutting and cutting further away from it, and then they kind of stopped when they got into the hill of University Heights.
42:54
So University Heights neighborhood still has its original oak trees. They weren’t cut in the direction closer to the Capitol by the muster for camp Randalls departure to the Civil War. Anyway, beautiful old neighborhood. Most of the houses are from, I would say, the teens, maybe going into the 20s, and also maybe as early as the 1890s they’re very sizable, very beautifully built and filled with the kind of detail that we don’t have on mid-century houses plaster and bastard Tudor half timbering and a lot of craftsman beauty.
43:33
And I noticed that one of the lovely sort of cottage half-timbered style houses along there had just been modern farmhouse, all of the wood and all of the stucco painted paper white and the windows all replaced with black trim and frames. And I was running by, and I hadn’t been on that block for a while, and I saw it, and I just swore right out loud. It was it was so loud. Fortunately, nobody appeared to be home or outside or around at that moment, but I just could not help myself. It was just such a shocking thing. So yeah, to me, the whole modern home farmhouse trend feels appropriate only on October 31 and every other day of the year.
44:16
It is just completely cursed to me for any era of house, not just a nightmare mid-century remodel scenario, but a nightmare remodel scenario, universally across the board. Okay, so what do I want to leave you with? There are so many nightmares out there for lovers of mid-century, because so many people have been discouraged from appreciating what’s great about their house and encouraged to make period incorrect choices through the last couple of decades, right up into right now.
44:44
This year, if you call any contractor, the odds are they’re going to advise you to make choices just like their last five clients, and they are going to be very modern farmhouse choices, because that’s what’s on trend right now. And they assume that trendy choices are going to make you happy, they’ll feel. Fresh, they’ll feel new, and everyone will be able to see that this remodel just happened. But for you, the homeowner, you’re looking for something much more timeless, because you don’t want a trendy remodel that will be out of trend in five years. You want a remodel that leans into the features that drew you to your mid-century house in the first place, a remodel that will last.
45:18
And what I can give you to wake up from the nightmare is that the best way that I know to cure a bad remodel from the past is to start with a master plan approach, not jumping in and changing something again willy nilly, but taking a big picture vision for the whole house and then maybe taking a big swing at a major contractor remodel as soon as you can afford and organize for it, or maybe just setting up and knocking down a series of smaller projects, one after another that will still feel coherent and consistent because you’ve got your style guide set and your Master Plan vision in place.
45:56
You need the strategy in order to combat something as big and scary as a nightmare mid-century remodel scenario. All right, my friends, that is it for this week. If you are looking for some help with putting together a style guide, or working with me to create a master plan, or just following the mid-century Master Plan method with guidance inside of the ready to remodel program, I’ve got resources for all of that on the show notes page, but what I want you to know most of all is that there is hope out there. You can start making changes right now.
46:25
And even if you yourself have made choices for your house you don’t love in the past, you can start making choices you like better. Going forward, all the resources I mentioned, and maybe a couple of pictures, although I don’t want to pick on anyone too much, we’ll see what I decide to put on the internet at the show notes page, mid mod, dash, midwest.com/ 2214.
46:47
I think next week topic is going to be the Sanborn fire maps and what old insurance information can tell us about mid-century houses back then and going forward. This is going to be an interesting little history, deep dive for the mid-century nerds among us. And we’ll probably be getting into the very relevant modern scenario of the insurability of certain homes in certain areas today. Catch you next week, mid mod, remodeler.