You’ve been dreaming about updating your mid-century home. But you feel overwhelmed about where to start. Let’s explore how to create a clear plan for your remodel—one that helps you move forward with confidence, avoid costly mistakes, and makes your home work better for you.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
What you DON’T need to get to a plan
The best part? You don’t need a 50-page architectural set of blueprints and specifications to make a successful change to your home.
What you do need …
The Elements of your Solid Plan
Your remodel plan doesn’t have to be complicated.Your remodel master plan can be as basic as:
- A bullet-point list of the updates you want to make.
- (FOR BONUS POINTS) a simple sketch of your layout changes.
- A visual guide to materials that keeps your design choices consistent.
The key is clarity—for yourself, your contractors, and anyone else involved in your project. Even the simplest plan will help you make confident decisions, stay on budget, and avoid headaches down the road.
The thinking behind it matters more
A great remodel plan is about more than just the details of what you want to change—it’s about why you’re making those changes and how they will improve your life in your home. Before you start sketching layouts or picking tile samples, ask yourself:
- What frustrates you about your home right now?
- How do you want your home to support your lifestyle better?
- What are the most important upgrades to help you get there?
Document the answers to these questions to help guide every decision you make, from materials to layout changes.
Match your plan to the energy and budget you have
Next match your plan to your energy level and you budget. Not every remodel needs to happen all at once. Is your plan (for now) a level one remodel where you paint, make hardware swaps and buy some new storage? Maybe you have the energy and budget to install new fixtures, flooring and make a minor layout change, tackling bigger structural changes and an addition down the line.
The best plan fits both your budget and your current energy level—so you don’t take on more than you can handle right now.
Listen Now On
Quick design tip for your…remodel plan
If you’re ready to plan a regret-proof remodel, don’t miss my live Mid-Century Remodel Masterclass happening this Saturday, February 22 at 11 AM Central!
On Saturday, you will learn how to:
- Make a plan that fits your home, budget, and lifestyle
- Avoid common mid-century remodel mistakes
- Get the exact process I use with my clients—so you can remodel with confidence
Mid Mod House Feature of the Week
Reeded glass sidelites are those textured glass panels often found beside mid-century front doors. They offer a perfect blend of privacy and style, allowing natural light in without exposing your entryway to the whole neighborhood.
If you have sidelights and love them, embrace them! If you’re considering adding one, reeded glass is a fantastic way to get the mid-century look. And if you’re replacing an awkward double door, a single door plus a side panel can be a budget-friendly and stylish alternative.
Resources
- Get ready to remodel with my free Masterclass! I’m going live on February 22nd with “How to Plan an MCM Remodel to Fit Your Life(…and Budget)”. Save your seat today!
- 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
So let’s talk about getting to a plan for your remodel, not a floor plan, certainly not a blueprint, necessarily, but a plan of action that you use to make a change for yourself, to call up and talk to a contractor to get an accurate price estimate of a bigger project, to make something happen in your house that you’ve been wanting.
Della Hansmann
Here are the facts you need to have a plan in place before you make a change, if you don’t want to end up regretting it, and there is a process that you really should follow in order to get that solid plan for your remodel. But here’s the good news, what that plan looks like has a wide range, and it’s not that hard to get to a plan for your remodel that can mean the difference between an expensive project that makes you wince when you think of it, or a fabulous home update you love living in.
Della Hansmann
Hey there. Welcome back to mid mod remodel. This is the show about updating MCM homes, helping you match a mid-century home to your modern life. I’m your host, Della Hansmann, architect and mid-century ranch enthusiast. You’re listening to episode 207.
Della Hansmann
All right, so today’s episode is going to be about getting to a plan that you can use to make a change in your house, large or small, and what that plan really needs. Spoiler alert, there are just two major ingredients that you need to have ready to go.
Della Hansmann
But I don’t have time today in one podcast episode to walk you through the recipe for that plan, the step by step instructions for how to ask yourself the right questions and go through the easy process in the right order that’s going to get you to the perfect plan for your home.
Della Hansmann
But I will be giving away that step by step process and the recipe at the live workshop that’s happening on Saturday. Are you already signed up at planning a mid-century remodel to fit your life and budget, which is happening again live on Saturday, I’m going to be talking about how to make that plan, why you need a plan, what the plan is going to give you, and how that budget element, how fitting your dreams, your hopes, your wishes for your house under the umbrella of what you can afford now in the future, both in terms of money but also in terms of time and energy, is possible.
Della Hansmann
This master class is it’s everything I believe in, and I make it available to everyone that wants to Go find it on the internet. It’s free, it’s searchable. It’s there for anyone who wants to make good choices for their mid-century home, because I love your mid-century home, and I want the best for you and your home.
Della Hansmann
So I will walk you through the exact process that I use for my clients that I teach inside my paid programs that we just covered inside the kitchen, clinic workshop a couple of weeks ago, this step by step process is the formula for success, and it’s going to get you the result that we’re talking about today on this episode, the plan that you need to do something yourself, to get permission to do what you want to do from your local municipality, to show to one general contractor who will take care of all the work for you, or to use to explain to each subcontractor in a self-managed project how this is all going to turn out.
Della Hansmann
This is the plan you need to get a successful proof remodel, and I’ll be walking you through the step by step process, plus some cheerleading and some encouraging and a whole lot of mid-century design advice on Saturday. So please come also, by the way, Saturday’s live clinic is more fun than the recording because you get a chance to ask questions. You can comment as we go along. You can.
Della Hansmann
We’ll have some spontaneous questions pop up. This is always true, and at the end of the live clinic, which is meant to last about an hour less, if I can get it all fast, talked quickly enough, but at the end, I always stay and answer questions until there are no more questions. This sometimes takes 45 minutes or another hour of people sharing their worries about their house, about picking finishes, about where to start, about the bad news they got from a contractor when they spoke to someone about their worries about structure, about style, about the history, about resale value, whatever your question is, whatever is holding you back from getting started on your house.
Della Hansmann
Come and chat with me about it. On Saturday. I’m there for it, literally. So yeah, are you signed up for the class? If you’re not, this is your tip of the week. This is your resource. This is everything I’ve got to offer you. Go sign up at mid mod midwest.com/signup. It’s that easy.
Della Hansmann
And I would love to talk to you about your house and to give you an enthusiastic pep talk, plus the recipe for how to plan a mid-century remodel for your home that you are going to love, that’s going to match your style, match your budget, and match the house you have to the way you want to live with your family, with your household, by yourself in your home for now and for decades to come. There it is. That’s the sell.
Della Hansmann
This is the advice I give my friends. This is the advice I gave my little sister when she planned to remodel for her home. And I’m giving it to you. If you’ve got any work you want to do on your house in the next year, in the next several years, if you’ve been waiting for a couple of years to make a change to your house that you know it needs show up on Saturday, you will not regret it.
Della Hansmann
By the way, if you’re not free on Saturday, of course, there will be a recording. It will be live afterwards. But I would love for you to show up in person on the Zoom and ask me your questions, give me your feedback, tell me what your biggest worries are, so that I can help you allay them and get you moving forward into that plan for your remodel. So let’s talk now about the plan.
Della Hansmann
By the way, the show notes for this episode are going to be in our normal format at mid mod midwest.com/2007, you can also sign up for the master class at the show notes page.
Della Hansmann
So here’s the great news, what you need as a plan, the output, the documentation you need in order to move forward can actually be incredibly simple. It depends on a number of factors, how much or little information need to have gathered in order to move forward, to make a change in your house depends on who’s going to do the work.
Della Hansmann
You all by yourself, you with assistance from friends or family or subcontractors, a contractor, who’s going to take it on and manage it for you. It also depends on how much you’re doing, whether the scales are a bunch of little repair tweaking projects, or if you’re taking on a bigger, comprehensive transformation of the house, if you’re dealing with undoing a past remodel, or if you’re dealing with a structural issue or remediating asbestos in the drywall So it all has to come down, that sort of thing.
Della Hansmann
You’re going to need more detail in your plan, because the more you change, the more you want to make sure you’re not damaging the mid-century character of your house, but it can still be relatively focused. We’re looking for the core of the idea, the basic information that’s going to help you and everyone that’s working on the project together understand the scope, scale and style of what’s going on.
Della Hansmann
Generally, though, it’s all going to boil down to two types of information, something that shows what parts of the house you want to change and how, and something that shows what you want the new change to look like. That’s so basic. So the range of those two components can be so wide it could be literally just a little list, a bullet point list of change this door opening, replace this cabinet, repair this broken light fixture, and run new flooring through these two rooms.
Della Hansmann
That’s a small project that could still have a pretty transformative effect. Now, if you just have a list of what you want to change, you and the person who’s going to make those changes for you might be visualizing very different things. So it’s helpful to have also something that shows what you want the change to look like in a project as small as what I just named. You might specifically call out the flooring type that you want.
Della Hansmann
You might even choose the light switch that you want, or just say, match existing light switches in the house. Similarly, if you’re just replacing one part of a line of cabinets, you might say, match to existing. That’s a pretty straightforward thing, and that is enough, depending on who’s going to do the work.
Della Hansmann
That might be all you need to know if you’re having a conversation with your handyman style contractor, a one man band kind of an operation, he comes by, he has the garage code to your house. He comes in with his own materials and tools and just sort of gets things done for you and has a pretty good idea, maybe shares your taste in mid-century, a little bit that kind of a verbal list, probably you want it to be written down, might be enough to get the project done.
Della Hansmann
Well, the bigger the project is, the more little decisions are involved in it. The more you want to have clarity about exactly what’s going to happen and exactly what it’s going to look like, and this, again, let’s talk about the two ends of this range. So the high end, the most information you could pack into your plan for a remodel is the kind of work I used to do in my past life as a high end residential architect and designer in Chicago.
Della Hansmann
I might spend months working on only one project, the process with lengthy and detailed the output those two pieces of information, what’s going to change and what it’s going to look like, was even more detailed. This involved large format drawing sets, the kind you see an architect carrying around rolled up in a movie.
Della Hansmann
Dozens and dozens of sheets would cover the site, the zoning, the property information, the existing conditions, demolition plans, new floor plans for every level, reflected ceiling plans to show the lighting layout above, electrical diagrams, plumbing diagrams, structural specialty pages, extra information submitted by two hour office, by engineers who specialized In structural spans, mechanical systems, balancing and more plus interior and exterior elevations.
Della Hansmann
Elevations are like a plan of a wall showing every wall of every bathroom, kitchen entry, storage area, new window and more, all of that keyed to detailed material schedules. Those are spreadsheets, basically listing every door and window, every door handle, every plumbing fixture, appliance, wood stain color, tile type, counter and paint color to be used in the house.
Della Hansmann
All of this, the plans and specs would form a part of the signed contract with the builder. That, by the way, is why a builder is called a contractor, because they are working to a contract. And this would then be reviewed and regularly overseen by someone in our office to ensure that every detail was built exactly as planned. Now this is a great way to get a perfect preview of what your project will look like when it’s done. Making it happen required the full time labor for a big chunk of the Year by multiple registered architects and designers.
Della Hansmann
Here’s the truth. You don’t need this for your house to turn out. Well, getting to a plan for your remodel is not your full time job, and it doesn’t need to be on the other end of the spectrum if you want to do even relatively intense work to your house that you plan to do yourself add on a small space, like, for example, in my home, when I connected my garage and house by enclosing the breezeway and turning it into a mud room.
Della Hansmann
You can bet I did a lot of planning, a lot of drawing, a lot of diagramming. Frankly, I made a 3d model that included every element of structure and layer, from the two by fours out to the exterior siding. But all I needed to do to get permission from the city. To do that was to give them a lightly hand sketched diagram plan that showed the dimensions of the space and the fact that the two spaces were connected by a continuous roof, so that I needed not to worry about footing.
Della Hansmann
And then they wanted to make sure what they were very interested in was that I understood the proper requirements for insulating a residential space that I was creating out of garage wall and thin air, and that was just to diagram again, that I knew the proper R values that needed to go into the walls, floor and roof. The actual output, the list of what I was going to do, was basic to the point of being diagrammatic, but it did cover the basics. It showed that I had thought it through and that I knew what I was going to do.
Della Hansmann
So what’s required is very, very basic. What that requirement doesn’t cover is the thinking, the process of getting to the plan for your remodel, the thinking you need to do behind it, and really the level of detail, the level of precision, the minuteness of your plan, what it should change and what it should look like, is to me, almost less important than your process for getting there.
Della Hansmann
Have you really thought it through? Because you could get to that simple diagram of here’s how many square feet I want to enclose. There will be a door here, a wall here, and I understand the proper, required installation for all of it. You could do that and get permission to make a change in your house from the city, and that would be all that anybody is asking of you. But for yourself to get to a plan for your remodel that will actually result in a space that you love, you need to do a little bit more.
Della Hansmann
The process for getting to a plan for your remodel is not complicated, but it has some unskippable steps that ironically, most people do skip. And here’s the really deep irony, I actually believe that, unfortunately, a lot of the work that I put so many of my professional hours into in Chicago skipped some of these steps, it wasn’t inherent in the process of the firm that I worked for at that point to dive deeply into the why of a remodel, to ask our clients, what were the qualities of life they were trying to change by shifting the space and materials of their house.
Della Hansmann
We certainly met our professional responsibility to make sure that it was detailed, thorough, structurally stable and beautiful, but we didn’t ask the right questions about meaning, and so I often feel that today, I am providing a much more tailored service. I am really getting to the heads of my clients. I am giving them results that are going to change their lives, so much more than the work that I did when we were creating much more detailed output, much more detailed plan information, despite the fact that it’s taking me a fraction of the labor hours to produce.
Della Hansmann
And this is really what I believe you can do as well. It’s what I’m going to teach in the master class on Saturday, and what I’ll touch on a little bit later in this episode, that process of how to get to the output, because it’s so important and it’s so overlooked, what most people in America do when they want to plan a change for their house is a lot like what our clients at The firm I worked for in my past life would do is they would know something was wrong.
Della Hansmann
They would want a change in their life. Often it was a little bit esthetic. They wanted to keep up with the Joneses. You might have a friend or a neighbor who’ve done this type of remodel on a smaller, less expensive scale. You may have undertaken a remodel like this yourself. Here’s how much people do it, they feel I’m frustrated with my kitchen right now.
Della Hansmann
I saw some pictures on Pinterest of what I wish my kitchen was like. So I’m gonna call the kitchen store. There might be a company in your town called the kitchen design store, or something along those lines, and you can tell them, I need a new kitchen. Can we remodel? They’ll say yes, of course. You’ll say, I wish it looked like this. They’ll say, Yes, we can absolutely do that. You’ll say, I want more storage space. They’ll say, Great, we’ll put in more cabinets, and you’ll go forward from there.
Della Hansmann
You might also have a more detailed list of changes you’d like to make. Frustrations with the way that the house works. It feels dark. You want more storage. You want a coffee bar. You add to add a window you want to replace broken or poorly functioning cabinets with soft closed drawers like you saw at a friend’s house.
Della Hansmann
Maybe you have a whole Pinterest board of things you’d like it to look like, and an experienced contractor or a kitchen store design professional will respond to that wish and frustration list and some pins with a host of suggestions. They may have an in house draftsperson who draws up plans and cabinet elevations of your project. They may show you a numbered list of photographs of each and every tile, appliance, faucet like picture they plan to include. You’ll feel like you’re very well prepared for the remodel.
Della Hansmann
And honestly, I don’t know. Maybe this does create a good enough result for some people who don’t have a very strong taste and who don’t live in mid-century homes. But here is what I know, it will not create a good result for you. I just recorded a YouTube video this week for the mid mod Midwest channel talking about why it can feel like everyone in the world is out to get your mid-century home design wise, and those reasons, which I go to in more detail there include helpfulness, just trying to please you by giving you the same result that has pleased the last couple of clients that that kitchen disorder designer or that contractor has worked with.
Della Hansmann
They also have to do with the ego of the designer or the person who’s suggesting changes, wanting to make a dramatic difference in the house they wanted to look before and after starkly changed, and also just the general fast fashion of our capitalistic society, which is constantly trying to create a new latest style, a new latest trend.
Della Hansmann
So if you go to a regular contractor or a kitchen store and say, I want a new kitchen, and here is my wish list, even if you bring them a Pinterest board of mid-century houses, they’re not going to know how to parse that, and they’re going to end up giving you something that looks a lot more like the latest trendy remodel for 2025 than it does, like whatever your house would suggest from its original design DNA. So this is this is the way that a lot of the remodels of the past have happened.
Della Hansmann
This is how all of those weird Tuscan Villa style changes got put into houses in the 90s. It’s where the sort of modern cottage style came from in the early 2000s it’s where all this farmhouse nonsense has been coming from. From that sense of fast fashion wanting to make a dramatic change for the before after photo and the good natured wish to just give you a result that quote, unquote, most people seem to like.
Della Hansmann
So the only way for a mid-century homeowner, for you, for me, to get to a plan for your house that’s going to look like it’s always been meant to be there a timeless remodel you don’t need to touch again in five or 10 or 15 years, is to have that second part. What will it look like really dialed in. And that’s more than a Pinterest board that is going to look like style sheets. It’s going to look like some of your material choices already made.
Della Hansmann
I’ll be talking more about the output, exactly of what that should be at the masterclass on Saturday, and I’ve talked about it in other episodes. If you’re particularly worried about what your house is going to look like, go back and check out the four part podcast series I did on this a couple of years ago. Episodes 1201 through 1204 that would have been in April 2023 and that boils down the exact output of a style guide and how to get to it.
Della Hansmann
But the other thing that everyone should do, regardless of the mid-century home, and that the typical process of making your to do list, your plan for a remodel, completely overlooks is asking yourself the questions of, why do you want to make a change to your house? What do you want the future of your life, your family in that house to be and how will the way you shift the house make that future life more or less probable?
Della Hansmann
This is what no one seems to ask, and it’s, to me, the bedrock of a good plan for your remodel. It is the underlaying structure. It’s like the foundation for your house, and to plan your remodel without asking those questions, no matter how detailed the outcome, no matter how many pages of demolition plans and floor plans and annotated elevations you generate or cause someone else to generate on your behalf. If you don’t ask those questions beforehand, it’s like building a beautiful, detailed house on a couple of rocks laid out on the floor, instead of on a concrete or a stone or a solid foundation of any sort.
Della Hansmann
So let’s talk a little bit about what are the three ingredients that get you to a plan for your remodel that’s going to last and frankly, that will help you generate the level of detail easily that you need, whether it’s just a simple list, whether it’s a diagrammatic floor plan and a couple of material examples, whether it is a full mid-century master plan. This process isn’t hard. These questions aren’t difficult or complicated, although they do require you to take them seriously and have a little insight into yourself.
Della Hansmann
But there’s no cheat code for this. There’s no skipping it. And I today, when I create a mid-century master plan for one of our custom clients, don’t do that work unless you have first done the work of telling me what you’re hoping to change about your life.
Della Hansmann
Now I’ll hold your hand for all of our clients. We give them little writing assignment homework pieces, but I also have a long and detailed meeting with every one of our clients where I walk through things they’ve already shared with me in detail and ask more questions about daily life, experience, the complexity of the morning routine, what it feels like to spend time in different rooms in their home. They like things to be connected or separated.
Della Hansmann
These kind of questions, again, are not rocket science, but they are essential for getting to what should change about the house, and what will change about the house getting to the plan for your remodel that you can then carry forward one mini project per weekend, one smaller thing this year, and a bigger thing in two years that you’re saving up for, or all at once in one big project. For anyone who’s listened to any couple of episodes of mid modern model.
Della Hansmann
You probably can already intuit that I’m going to be talking about the first three steps of the master plan method to dream about what you want your life in the house to be like, to discover what’s up with the house right now, in terms of its materiality, in terms of its maintenance schedule, in terms of its structure, and then to distill your personal mid-century style, just like there’s an absolutely acceptable range in the level of detail of the output your plan how much information goes into what’s going to change about the house and what it should look like, there is a wide range in how much time you can pour into asking yourself those three general buckets of questions, what you want it to live like?
Della Hansmann
What’s going on right now, what you want it to look like. But every amount of time, every moment you spend thinking about these things, whether you do it just on a regular basis while you walk the dog, you kind of ponder it a little bit and then make a few notes to yourself, or whether you make a standing date with your partner to spend an hour or two every evening or every weekend thinking through these things in a step by step manner.
Della Hansmann
Following, for example, all the workbooks and guides that I include into my ready to remodel program, any amount of time you spend will pay dividends is an investment in how much your changes to your house will ultimately add up to something that makes the home you’re hoping for, or whether they just change the house from what it is to something else and end up looking newer, but maybe not even better, certainly in a few years, whether they hold up in quality, in value, and there’s really no outsourcing this work, this early work, these questions to ask yourself.
Della Hansmann
You can absolutely seek the opinion of experts at every stage along the process of your model. You can look for expert design opinions. You can look for help with space planning. You can look for expertise on what’s necessary for your structure, your mechanical systems. I don’t expect you to know the answers to any of those things, but asking yourself what you want, no one can tell you the answer to that better than you can tell yourself.
Della Hansmann
I certainly don’t tell my clients what they want. Instead, I ask them, and then I offer them solutions that are going to help them get the plan for a remodel that suits where they are in the life right now and where they want to be going. This is the way to get the most bang for your buck. This is the way to make the most necessary pressing projects happen first. This is the way to figure out how to do something that’s going to have a big effect with a relatively small budget change. And this is also the way to prioritize.
Della Hansmann
I talk to so many people who are stuck in indecision, and this might feel very relatable to you, particularly if you’re facing down the barrel of you just got a house and you’re trying to take on all of the decisions about it once. But perhaps just as much if you’ve been in your house for a couple of years or longer, and you’ve cut, have knocked off all the obvious projects to more or less your own satisfaction.
Della Hansmann
You’re pretty proud of some of them. Maybe you’ve got some a few little wincing. I wish I hadn’t done that things about your previous projects. But when you start to get to a certain point of complexity, maybe it’s the kitchen, maybe it’s getting to a small addition that you wanted to take on, maybe it’s the point when you stop DIY-ing and you start calling a contractor.
Della Hansmann
So many people that I speak to and have experienced this in my own life, hit a wall of decision overload, and this is where getting to a plan for your remodel, getting to that output of what else are you going to do and what is it going to look like, which sounds so simple when I boil it down that way, can be completely overwhelming, because you don’t know what comes first, what comes next.
Della Hansmann
You don’t know what’s more important. When you have a limited budget, where are you going to allocate those dollars when you have limited time? What’s the project that needs to happen this year or needs to happen before another so that you don’t end up redoing work?
Della Hansmann
The way you get to that plan for your remodel is by following the steps of the master plan method, which asks you to go in the right order to simplify these decision making processes and start by the simplest of questions, asking yourself, what you want it to be like to live in your home.
Della Hansmann
Simple, by the way, doesn’t mean easy. It shouldn’t be hard. It shouldn’t be devastatingly difficult. It shouldn’t require you to create a dissertation on what you want and what you like. But simple as we know as mid-century style enthusiasts, sometimes a simple design is more challenging to get to than a fussy one.
Della Hansmann
So a simple answer, what do I want my life to be like in my home might require a little bit of introspection. It might require you to take some time, but that time will pay off so intensely, the level of detail you put into the plan for your house is not as important as how grounded that detail is, if you can justify exactly what general changes you want to make, but you don’t exactly know how many inches over you want that doorway to move.
Della Hansmann
You can work with a contractor who will show you options. You can work with a designer like myself who create renderings for you and show you what two different ways might look like. But if you know what you really need is a way to have a conversation between the kitchen and the living room. From there, you can brainstorm it.
Della Hansmann
Other people can help you. Tell you the structural requirements for an opening, show you options for how open or closed it might be. But that underlying why that’s more important than exactly knowing yourself how it should be executed, and similarly, knowing what your remodel should look like is going to come from your innate sense of mid-century style. From the name you’ve given it. From knowing that you are more interested in this sort of jaunty, joyfulness of atomic modern with bright colors and bold shapes and Starburst clocks than you are in the more subtle, refined, minimalist version of organic modern with a lot of wood grain and maybe some like Frank Lloyd right Usonian red stained concrete floors.
Della Hansmann
Knowing that you’ve named your style, knowing that you’ve created the overall ethos, means that you don’t necessarily have to have picked out every single material before you call in help, and that you’ll be able to ask someone else to help you with the work, the labor, of picking out every single final finish, and they’ll be able to do that job for you well.
Della Hansmann
And you’ll be able to, yes, know what they supply to you effectively, confidently, without getting caught up in a Oh, yeah, I guess that’s fine, and then seeing it in final place and realizing it wasn’t going in the direction you’d hoped. So getting to the plan is more important than what the plan is, or more accurately, getting to the plan for your remodel will define the success and what the plan for your remodel is.
Della Hansmann
So that is my desire for you, my hope for everyone, really, is that we can just infuse a little bit more time into getting to the plan than knowing exactly what it is. Having a really, really detailed Pinterest board is a lot more about having a fleshed out plan than it is about the process of getting to the right plan.
Della Hansmann
Getting to the right plan for your remodel is perhaps, I don’t know, maybe that should have been my title for the episode, but the right plan for you has to do with your lifestyle, your approach the house you’re starting from, your budget, your energy right now.
Della Hansmann
And all of those things are deeply, intensely personal, and they’re things that other people can give you excellent advice on, but only up to a point, only to meet you where you are with your own desires, needs and requirements, and the help you’ll get from everyone whose advice you solicit during this process will all be conditioned by how you’re asking them for advice and what you’re telling them about your hopes, dreams and desires before you get started.
Della Hansmann
So if you take one thing away from today, getting to a plan for your model is more about the process of getting there, about getting to the right plan, than it is about having the perfect amount of detail in the plan itself. The perfect you’ve figured out how to create architectural blueprints, and you’ve created them.
Della Hansmann
What are they blueprints of have you workshopped various options? Have you started from your why? And you don’t have to create this blueprint yourself at all. There are plenty of people out there who can help you create a design and execute on it, and those people can really provide you excellent help when you know what you’re trying to achieve from your own model.
Della Hansmann
For more on this, please, please come to or take a gander at the newly updated planning a mid-century remodel to fit your life and budget and budget. Yes, this is hugely important to me as a mid-century homeowner, and on behalf of all my clients, master class that’s happening live again on this Saturday, February 22 at 11am Central. If you’re not free at that particular time, sign up for the class anyway, because I’ll shoot you an email immediately, once it’s done with a recording that you can watch on your own time.
Della Hansmann
Or perhaps if you come to the class live, you’ll still want to watch the recording again, because I do expect it to be that full of good ideas that you want to follow up on if you need more support in getting to a great plan for your remodel. I would love to help you out with that, and I’ve got a bunch of different ways that I can do that, ranging from having a one to one call to give a little audit of the house you’ve got right now and what you could change about it, to guiding you through the step by step process of the master plan method within my ready to remodel homeowner program.
Della Hansmann
Which, by the way, I am about to make wildly more affordable. We’re instituting a pricing structure change that. If you’ve been on the fence about joining ready to remodel in the past, all of your concerns should be allayed when you come to the master class, I’ll walk you through at the end how that’s going to happen and how that’ll be more available to you, or if you want to work with mid mod Midwest to have a mid-century master plan, custom created for your home, we’re here for all of that because, to me, the most important thing is that you get to a plan for your remodel that really works.
Della Hansmann
That’s worth it. That’s worth the time, the effort, the whatever ends up in the landfill, the new materials created that’s going to last, that’s going to make your mid-century house better for you, better for the next couple of generations.
Della Hansmann
These little houses are so wonderful. I love them so much, and I just want the best for every mid-century house, and specifically right now for yours.
Della Hansmann
Before I let you go, let’s talk about our mid mod house feature of the week. Today, I want to talk about read glass side lights by a front door. These are marvelous for peeking out and having a view, but still having so much privacy, so that no one walking by on the sidewalk is staring straight down a hallway, right into your kitchen or into a T intersection that you have to cross to get from one part of the house to another, perhaps not as fully clothed as you’d like to be.
Della Hansmann
They’re also just really beautiful feature of mid-century homes. I had this on my mind to do a couple of weeks ago, and skipped it, but then I just got to question my DMs earlier this week. That made me think it was the perfectly appropriate topic for today, someone had asked, they said they had a double door, and was there a budget friendly way to replace that door with a new mid-century appropriate door?
Della Hansmann
And my answer to them was, there are ways to replace a double door, and you certainly could. But will it break the bank? It might. Double doors are expensive. They’re pretty custom, and frankly, they’re not my favorite. They were sort of a feature.
Della Hansmann
There have been double doors throughout history, but they were a feature in a certain kind of mid-century, 60s ranch that I think had this sense of, like block parties throw the doors open, everyone can wander in, but from a daily use perspective, they’re a little awkward. They’re kind of hard to secure. They require complicated hardware, and they’re certainly hard, this occurs to me in the Midwest, particularly on this extremely cold, wind chill day that we’re having as I record it, they’re hard to weather strip properly.
Della Hansmann
So I prefer not to see a double door on a mid-century house. If you’ve got one and you love it, knock yourself out. There’s no reason to change it if it’s performing properly and it’s not bothering you. But as an alternative, what I absolutely love, what I endorse, what I try to put into houses that have a double door, that have a single door, any house that’s got space beside the front door that we could cut in a space for a side light window, I would like to put in a full height
Della Hansmann
glass panel next to the door. This is, by the way, if you’re looking this up, if you want to google it, side, light is spelled L, I T, E not L, I G, H, T, a side. Light is just a glass panel next to a door. It doesn’t have to be the same width of this door. In fact, elegantly, it’s often only 15 or eight inches wide.
Della Hansmann
And a very clever alternative to it being clear glass is that it can be reeded glass, so it has that sort of vertical, thick and thin texture lines that creates a little bit of a wobbly effect. When you get right up to read a glass, it’s a lot like glass block or any other privacy glass material.
Della Hansmann
You can see outlines a little more clearly the closer you get to it, but the further both objects are away from the glass, the more they become fuzzy outlines or nothing at all, and it also just creates a fun little visual feature. So a frosted glass or a reeded glass side light at the front door is a feature of a lot of original mid-century houses that were reaching for a bit more design elegance.
Della Hansmann
And if you’ve got one, I’d love to hear, do you like it? Do you? Do you not like it for any reason? They’re a nice place to you can put an umbrella stand or a bench in front of them. They bring in more daylight to a hallway.
Della Hansmann
They give you a sense of is somebody standing out there or not, maybe not who you might want to peek through a real window or a peephole to see is that the UPS guy or a friend or a neighbor who’s standing on the doorstep, but you can see that someone is there. And sometimes you can see someone is there because they’re standing close to the door while you stand far enough back that they can’t see that you’re there, which is particularly nice for my introverted heart.
Della Hansmann
Anyway, if you have one of these, I’d love to hear about it. I’ll put a couple of pictures of some of my favorites into the show notes page. Of course, this is a feature that, if you’ve got it, flaunt it. You may or may not want to modify that original rate of glass, and perhaps the most common modification people make is to add another pane of glass inside or outside of the reading glass, to give it a double pane or more insulation, which is something you can have a glazing specialist, not a window replacement person, because they’ll want to take out and throw away the existing window.
Della Hansmann
But a glazier can help you add glass to existing Windows, or you might want to replace it with insulated glass or tempered glass, if it’s not already tempered, so that it’s stronger next to a door that might get slammed, you never know.
Della Hansmann
But it’s also something you can add if you don’t have a side light next to your door, but you’ve got any wall space next to it, you could cut in while you’re doing a door replacement project a wider opening and put in a side light. If you have a double door that drives you nuts, that you don’t enjoy, that doesn’t perform properly and you need to replace it. It’s a great alternative to replacing a double door with a single door and a fixed glass side light.
Della Hansmann
And if so, reeded glass is what I might recommend, or you could do clear and put up down shades over all of them, or for a less expensive or less permanent alternative, rice paper, cling film can be a very budget friendly way to get privacy out of glass that is otherwise transparent.
Della Hansmann
That is just about all. I have to say this episode, 2007 if you’re checking for the show notes, it’s midmod-midwest.com/ 2007. But here’s what I really want. I want you to take the time to think about the why of the changes you’re making to your home even more than you think about what changes specifically, because it will help you make decisions more confidently and more correctly for your home.
Della Hansmann
It will help you regret proof your remodel, and I will be walking you through the step by step process that I’ve developed over working with hundreds of mid-century homeowners on custom plans for their home updates on Saturday at the live workshop. I’d really love for you to be there. So if you’re not signed up already, go sign up right now.
Della Hansmann
Mid mod midwest.com/signup. And if you’re listening to this episode long after it was originally recorded, there will always be, I think I can confidently say I always want this information to be available.
Della Hansmann
I’m not, this is not a secret. There’s no gatekeeping here. I want everyone to know how to plan a great a regret proof remodel for a mid-century home. So use the short link, mid mod, midwest.com/signup and then show up on Saturday. I will see you there.