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Questions an architect should ask about you(r house)

29 min readI’m sharing some key questions I ask my all my clients to make sure their remodel reflects their life and priorities.

Understanding your energy, experience, and expectations before you begin planning a remodel can transform your experience and the outcome. Whether you’re planning a small update or a full renovation, asking the right questions—about yourself and your home—can help ensure your remodel is a fit for your house and the life you want to live in it. 

The right questions will guide you through matching your energy, experience, and expectations to create a remodel plan that works for you.

Remodeling can feel overwhelming, especially if you’ve never done it before. My advice? Match your remodel plan to the energy you have. But how can you know how much energy you actually have available for a remodel, if you’ve never actually planned and led one before? Well … you can ask for help!

Any good designer or architect you work with should be curious about your energy and experience … as well as your style and budget … before you work together. I sure am!

Here’s what I’ll ask when we chat about your Mid Mod Remodel

What’s your home’s story? 

Whether you’ve lived in your mid-century house for decades or just bought it on a whim during a competitive market, every home has a story. Understanding how you use your space and what you love (or dislike) about it sets the foundation for great design.

What’s your remodeling experience level?

Have you tackled DIY projects before, or is this your first time updating a home? Your comfort level with managing contractors, making design decisions, and staying involved in the process will shape the type of support you need.

What’s holding you back from the next step?

For many homeowners, the biggest barrier is fear—fear of making the wrong choice, spending too much, or getting overwhelmed. By identifying your biggest concerns, you can create a clear plan to overcome them, whether it’s hiring an architect, creating a phased remodel plan, or breaking the project into manageable steps.

Want to ask the right questions about … your kitchen update?

If you’re feeling ready to tackle one of the biggies of home remodeling, check out my upcoming Mid-Century Kitchen Clinic on February 8! My hands-on workshop will teach you how to design a forever kitchen that balances functionality with timeless MCM style.

Listen Now On 

Apple | Google |  Spotify

Quick design tip for…your energy level

Already feeling overwhelmed with your usual day to day? Start small. Focus on what you can realistically accomplish now, whether it’s a weekend painting project, swapping outdated hardware, or creating a Pinterest board for future inspiration. You don’t need to have all the answers—or a full budget—to take meaningful first steps toward your remodel goals.

Grab my Room Recipe for help tackling a right-sized project for the energy you have.

Mid Mod House Feature of the Week

Have you ever encountered a kitchen doorbell? Many mid-century homes included a second doorbell near the kitchen entrance, a nod to an era when neighbors and delivery services used this space as the primary point of access.

While these doorbells have often been removed or disconnected, they’re a delightful reminder of mid-century community culture. If you have one, consider restoring it as a playful design element—or think about how your home’s doors and entryways function today.

Resources 

And you can always…

Read the Full Episode Transcript

There are a few key things I always want to know about a mid-century homeowner before I know that I can help them. So if you’ve been thinking about reaching out to mid mom Midwest for a chat in the near future, you’ll find this episode a helpful guide to what you can expect us to talk about. 

But even if not, anyone who wants to take on improving or changing your mid-century home, today, we’re talking about the questions that an architect should ask about you and about your house, but also the questions that you can ask yourself about you and about your house in order to set yourself up for a really happy, successful, well planned mid-century remodel. 

Hey there. Welcome back to mid mom 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 2003.

A few episodes ago, I was talking about matching and remodeling expectations to the energy you’ve got. But actually, even though that sounds like a logical, perhaps an obvious thing to do. It might be a little bit of a challenge, especially if you’re relatively new to the idea and to the process of Home Improvement, or even new to home ownership, which we’ve all been there once, if you’ve never remodeled before, how can you know what amount of energy it’s going to take? 

Of course, you know how much energy it might take to prepare a dinner every night. You’ve done this again and again and again throughout your life. You know what it takes to put together an elaborate spread to impress someone you care about and how it turned out for you. Hopefully it matched your effort level, and you’ve probably eaten cold pizza straight out of the box from the fridge. 

Well, if you’re me, you certainly have. And you know the relative effort energy and you know, satisfaction there too, the tradeoffs. But if you’ve never led a remodel before, whether you’ve asked someone else to do some work for you and kept track of them while they did it, or actually picked up a hammer, a paint brush, a crowbar, you might not really feel prepared to know what a matchup between energy and expectations even means. 

As I gave that a little bit more thought, I realized that I actually think about this as one of the first elements of getting to know a new client, a new potential project. Some of the most important information to me at the start of the project is assessing the energy and the experience that I think a homeowner, a couple, an individual, have before we get started, so I know how to match their energy with mine, how much support to provide, and in what way to provide it. And that assessment is actually something you can do for yourself. 

So that’s what we’ll spend our time on today, the questions an architect should ask you about you and about your house, but really about you. Before that, a little news. We are a few weeks out from the now annual, the fourth annual mid-century kitchen clinic. 

Mark your calendar for Saturday, February 8, and go sign up right away to get the early bird price. It’s an absolute steal for this two hour live workshop on mid-century kitchen upgrades and how to plan the perfect one for you and for your house. I walk you through a mini version of the master plan process I use for every client and for every ready to remodel student. 

We’ll start by asking you what really matters to you about your kitchen, identifying what facts, what data you need to have about the kitchen you have in order to start planning clearly and talking to contractors, designers, friends in order to make good, accurate choices, figure out the style, the overarching visual language of your kitchen, what the materiality is going to be, lock in some of the choices, perhaps at the clinic that will guide the way that the kitchen update is going to look. 

And I will walk you through dozens of real world examples of tricky mid-century kitchen layouts that I have helped clients of mine adjust and develop over the years. And finally, we put it all together in the process of how you make a mini master plan for your own kitchen, something that you can use to guide the kitchen remodel confidently and successfully from start to finish. This early bird prize is, in fact, right now,

I think through the next week and a half. But don’t wait. Just go get your spot right now. I can’t wait to see you there. And if you want to get all excited and prepared for the clinic in advance, you can go deep on research, on mid-century kitchen updates with resources I’ve already prepared. 

Start with my free kitchen guide. This is a workbook that puts you through the five essential elements of a great mid-century kitchen design, the things you’ve got to get right for a kitchen that looks good and works for you. Think about this as the last remodel your mid-century kitchen will ever need. To bring it up to code, to bring it up to a modern layout, but to do so in a way that is so style timeless that you don’t need to remodel it again in 10 years, and neither does anybody else, really. 

That’s a pretty powerful statement, but I stand by it. If you use the principles of a mid mod kitchen update, which you can find in the guide, you will be setting yourself up for a forever kitchen. But you can go deeper, because I’ve just.

Been pulling together. I’ve talked about kitchens so many times through the years. It’s one of the most central areas of the house. I have done podcast episodes on it, blog posts on it. Have visual examples on the website, and I just pulled all of those resources together into basically a kitchen guide that should help you take through if you whatever format you’re looking for information in, if you want all the podcast episodes, they’re there. If you want to my favorite, most useful blog posts, they’re there. 

If you want to know how to take the next step with your kitchen it’s there also. If you want to sign up for the kitchen clinic, it’s also in that Resources page. I think I’m with this is really excited, and I want you to check it out and maybe reach back to me and let me know if there’s another type of kitchen resource you are looking for, I can add it to the page as we go forward, find all of that. 

The free guide, a way to sign up for the clinic and the kitchen Resources page on the mid mod dash midwest.com website at slash kitchen. If you have nothing to improve or adjust about your mid-century kitchen, my hat’s off to you. Maybe you’re done. Maybe you already did it. Maybe you were living in a time capsule kitchen, and it just works perfectly for you. 

But generally, I find that the kitchen is the center of most mid-century remodel projects I have planned at this point, hundreds of mid-century kitchen upgrades in detail. One thing I never do enough is then to turn those plans, those designs, that thinking, into case studies that I put online. That’s what there won’t be quite enough of in the Resources Guide. I always mean to put in more. 

But I’ll tell you this, I will be updating the kitchen clinic this year with the best of this last year’s kitchen schemes, the most common problems successfully solved in new ways, the most tricky and unusual kitchens we’ve tackled in this last year and transformed for the better. So I do, I want to promise I’ll put more case studies on the website. But really, if you want to see what we’ve been doing in the world of kitchens in the last year and in the history of mid mod remodel, you want to sign up for this mid-century kitchen clinic. 

By the way, to all ready to remodel students. Don’t bother to sign up. You are already pre enrolled. And if you’re curious about ready to remodel, it is a great way to not only take yourself through the lessons, the step by step process, the framework of a full, satisfying, long term, focused remodel, but also a host of other really useful resources, guides, workbooks, step by step elements, and every mid-century kitchen clinic I’ve ever delivered in the last four years, since the first kitchen clinic. 

So I hope I will see you there. Now, let’s talk about pulling back from the step by step, from the how to think about a specific space and think more about you than your house. I want to talk you through the questions that you should know but be able to answer about yourself as you go into a remodel. And we’ll frame this as the questions that I would ask, the questions that an architect should ask about you and your house. 

I started thinking about this as I was searching for something unrelated in the last couple of weeks, a kitchen concept. Maybe I don’t remember, but I came across a house list of 13 essential questions to ask yourself before tackling a renovation, and not to be a snot about it, but I thought they were way off the mark. Not that they aren’t all questions that will come up at some point during a remodel and be useful at a certain point. 

But I wouldn’t call them essential. I don’t think they’re what you should start with. And more specifically, they’re not what I start with. To nitpick them, they included the accurate, I suppose, which was, what rooms do you want renovated? And sure, you are going to need to make a list your house has rooms you want to know which rooms you’re affecting and not affecting. 

A contractor will ask you that question, but I wouldn’t start there. I’m so much more interested in what feelings, what activities, what life experiences you’re trying to make space for in your home, what social outreach versus introvert based restorativeness You’re trying to create in your house. They do move on to a question of, how will you use the room you’re talking about? And a few more questions down there, 13 essential list. 

But I think that it’s so much more important to focus on the bigger picture, the philosophical element first, even though it doesn’t get as practical as, what’s the dollar value? What is the new kitchen tile. If you have a kitchen tile picked out for your remodel, that’s fine. That is absolutely okay. We are all allowed to have favorite things and to dream about them and to pin them on Pinterest and visit them regularly to see if maybe they’re overstocked and on sale. That’s totally okay. 

But that’s not the core of a remodel. It’s not the place we begin. And this list quickly devolves into things like, what type of stone Do you prefer? What is your cabinet door style? Again, these are finished questions you get to not last you don’t want these to be a surprise right at the end of the process, but this is not where you begin. The kind of questions you get asked when you walk into a kitchen store are not the kind of questions. 

Questions that an architect should ask you about yourself and about your home. They are always going to be focused on price points, finishes, materials, but when you’re thinking about how to transform the house you have into the home that you want to live in forever, we need to ask different questions, and asking the right questions is essential to coming up with good designs, to coming up to a real solution. 

The questions you ask yourself, and also the question that I that an architect should ask you about yourself and about your house, are going to frame all of the solutions, the design decisions getting to the right answer to the right problem. 

It all starts with questions. There are certainly architects out there who believe that they could look at a house or any building and come up with an improvement for it, just come up with the correct design for that space. Think about what they would like to see themselves most esthetically, what would be the best use of square footage. 

But for me, one of the reasons I’ve always had a passion for residential architecture is that it is the type of design that is most suited to a particular individual, a particular family, most centered on a person, and that has to come from a series of questions answered because there’s no way for me to imagine, to interpret, to assume what matters most to you about your house, and therefore to get to answers that will surprise and delight you. 

This is this is absolutely the core of it for me. Now I absolutely hope to plan, to have a goal, to surprise my clients, to surprise you, if you come and work with me with something you didn’t expect a layout that completely blows your mind, something that isn’t what you asked for at all, but does solve the problems you have. But I can’t get to that by just throwing spaghetti at the wall.  

I get to those scheme, three options that really make someone say, whoa. I hadn’t thought about it that way in our workshop meeting, by starting from the right questions, and those questions begin before we ever meet. So today I’m going to talk about the way I ask questions, and the questions that you could ask yourself, the questions that I hope any architect would ask you should ask you about your home and yourself before even beginning now, I go through two series of questions with a prospective client before agreeing to work with them. 

The first is that if you want to work with mid mod Midwest, I ask you to fill out a short form under a button called apply to work with us on our website. I have said many times on the podcast, this is meant to be absolutely non-threatening. You don’t have to have all your ducks in a row when you get to this place. 

This is the beginning of a process, but it is necessary just to have a little bit of a framework for who you are and what you’re looking for. So in that form, I ask a couple of questions about the house, its history, what year it was built, what has been done to it in the past by other people, and then a little bit moving towards you, what you want to change about it, both in the negative, the things that bug you the most and the positive. 

What mid-century features or elements are you most excited to add on to, to add to the house in the first place, to improve upon? I also have a few really basic yes, no questions about, have you remodeled before? Have you worked with an architect before? And your ideal timeline and budget? And then I’ve got a space for you to ask questions to me, which helps me to frame our first conversation, the budget, the timeline question. 

These might require a little bit of self-research, but in general, all of this is information that you should have at your fingertips. You should be able to tell me if you don’t have the accurate date, if you don’t know if it was built in 52 or 53 that’s fine, but I just want to know our jumping off point.

What I think you can really take away from this episode, the questions you should be considering to ask yourself whether or not you ever plan to work with an architect, are the type of things that come up once we get onto a call together, this is where we get back to that question of how your expectations match your available energy. 

Because all of the initial questions that I’m going to ask you as a mid-century homeowner, when we get onto a zoom together are about the energy you have available for your remodeling endeavor. I come at this from a couple of different directions. I’ll always ask you about whether you’ve ever modeled before, and that’s a checklist question on the form. 

But I want to know more. I want to know what have you done to your house already, and when? In what detail did you pick up a brush, a hammer, get in on the work yourself, or did you have to manage a couple of subcontractors to come in and deal with Quick Fix solutions to maintenance issues, or long term Delayed repairs on an elderly house, or was there some stylistic element of the previous homeowners horrible farmhouse flip that you just couldn’t even live with before you planned a bigger change? 

For people who tell me they’ve never remodeled before, that’s fine. It doesn’t mean you can’t tackle it this time, but it does mean that it’s going to be a little bit extra challenging for both you and me to predict in advance how much time energy, effort and attention that remodeling process will take from you. So I often come at this by asking for you to tell me the story of your house. 

How did you find it, what drew you to it, and how long have you lived there? I have all kinds of questions that I get to this from, this is my grandparents’ house, and I have loved it my entire life. I couldn’t be more excited to be the one that they gifted it to. And now we’ve got a checklist a mile long of little repair projects, but we want to really keep the spirit of this house intact. 

Also, we sometimes get the this is my grandparents’ house, and I love it, and it still needs to be the hub for fathering family gatherings, and I’ve got a list a mile long of things I want to change and transform about this house to make it my place so it doesn’t feel like my childhood summer vacation house, but really my home. 

On the other end of the spectrum, I get people who say, you know, we were looking for a house in the middle of the crunch in the pandemic summer 2021 we looked at three places. We put in offers on eight that we couldn’t even see. This is the one that got accepted. And here we are. We kind of like it. And also, we’ve got a lot of notes, but this is our house. 

I have that have to say, I get a couple of people every year who say they bought a mid-century house without knowing what it was, because of the location, because of housing crunch, purchase rushing, and that the reason they’re talking to me now is because, over time, having been in the house for a few years, they’ve come to really value it. They didn’t look for this style, they didn’t look for this layout, but now they’re in it. 

They’re like, Wow, it’s really convenient to have the single level living Wow. We love the way a split level gives us social spaces and privacy. Wow. We really have come to be charmed by some of these original features. That when we walked the house with our extended family, they were like, well, when are you going to get rid of that old stuff? 

So I get so many different answers to that tell me the story of your house question. They’re all so interesting, and I don’t, I don’t think of this as particularly common. A lot of people want to know what’s wrong with the house for you. They want to know, what are your plans for the future? Most people don’t start from what’s the history of you and your house. Tell me the love story of you and your house. 

And maybe it’s a marriage of convenience. Maybe it’s a passion for the ages. But to me, it is the first question. It’s the framing of, what is your level of satisfaction in the house right now? How has it grown? How is it limited? How can we improve on it? How invested Are you in the narrative of your house? What kind of house it is, how its mid-century qualities are or are not intact, its times, capital status, or how you want to put it back to something that feels more in line after a bad flip. 

Where I go from here is that I want to ask you a question, or multiple questions, about what you’ve tackled with the house already. For people who are calling me because they’ve just finished closing or they’re planning to close on a house, the answer is nothing. They haven’t done anything to the house because they may or may not have even been into it in person. 

I have worked with homeowners who bought a house in another region of the country, sight unseen, and they and I are both thinking about the possibilities based on remote information. I’m working on a house right now in Madison that the owner has never been to. But when someone has been in the house for a little while, for a few months or a few years, or sometimes for a few decades, what you have or haven’t taken on really helps me gage your experience level, your comfort level with home improvement projects. 

If you tell me that you’ve done a bunch of maintenance, repair, little projects, painted every room in the house, taken on an emergency repair in the bathroom, and now you’re ready to step up to a bigger project, I have a sense that you have a strong familiarity with the scale, complexity and stress level that a remodel might be. 

If I talk to someone and you tell me that you’ve been in the house for 11 years and you haven’t actually gotten around to changing a single thing yet, I may have a sense that we’re dealing with someone who does not have as much experience with hands on projects or even with construction management, or on the other hand, we might suss out that the reason behind that 11 years of no changes is that you’ve been stuck in analysis paralysis. 

If you’ve done literally nothing in that time, you may also have just been busy or overwhelmed, or it might have been your first house, and you didn’t have anyone else in your life as a guide to walk you through the process of making good choices and allocating your money the right way. Or possibly you’ve been waiting, you’ve been hesitating while you save and dream this whole time. But however it comes about, if you tell me that you’ve been in the house for a certain amount of time and made no changes to it whatsoever. 

It doesn’t tell me that you’re not prepared to remodel a house right now, but it does cue me to a different kind of experience that we will be working towards. I also want to know the story of other houses and any projects you’ve done in the past. All of these questions are meant to gage your familiarity with the remodeling process.   

Someone who tells me that you have remodeled before doesn’t necessarily indicate to me, as a checklist question, when I put it in the form that they’re going to want to be very hands on with the management or DIY the remodel this time, because I have talked to so many people who are in the same situation that I am, which is that they bought their house, they were extremely gung ho about the number of right off the bat projects, replaced the toilet, hung their own drywall, painted framed in a new addition. 

And now what they know most of all is that they are so willing to pay someone else to do and maybe even to completely manage some of these projects, rather than to handle them themselves. Again, I find that deeply relatable. So these questions that I want to ask are all about framing the scale. Are you planning to DIY in the project? Are you planning to self-manage? Or do you want to make sure that you’re putting together a plan that can be handed in its totality to a general contractor. 

And perhaps even looking for a general contractor that has an in house expediter who will be doing all day to day, checking and reporting to you in a really hands off way, how much help with construction management and how much help with design creativity do you need or want? The last thing I want to find out is what is been holding you back? What’s your biggest roadblock or worry right now for a lot of people, particularly those who have done some smaller projects around the house in the past, maybe tackled a small bathroom project, maybe converted a screen porch into a three season room. 

Della Hansmann  

Maybe done just sort of general house tune up projects like tearing out all the old icky wall to wall carpet, hopefully finding hardwood underneath, maybe laying a little bit of floor in the basement, maybe a full basement remodel. But now, when you think about maybe, if you’re going to be thinking about an owner suite, if you’re putting on a small addition, anything involving a kitchen, often gives people more pause. 

Della Hansmann  

Particularly if you have the experience and you’ve found that you know how much management and how many minor decisions add up to big effects in a smaller project, you can find yourself stuck at the moment of all right. 

Della Hansmann  

Now I want to take on the core of the house, the most important place, the social area, the area where I spend the most time, the most public area of the house, or conversely, now I want to get into my inner sanctum. I want to improve the place where I wake up and go to sleep every night. This I need to get right. This is often a place where people want to reach out and get more help. 

Della Hansmann  

That might be the guidance that you can get from like a ready to remodel program membership, which allows you to follow a step by step process, get workbooks and guides come to the mid-century architect office hours on a monthly basis. Or it might even be you just want to describe your challenges to someone else, someone like me, and have me prepare options based on my years of experience of working with mid-century houses, it may also be that your biggest roadblock right now is breaking down the scale and setting up the order of operations for the next couple of projects. 

Della Hansmann  

Often, the people that I work with are planning to remodel an entire house at once, particularly if they’re hitting me in the moment, if you are coming to me at the moment where you’ve just bought the house and you need to make changes to it before you move in, but in many other cases, we are breaking a master plan apart into phases. And that question is really important to ask yourself. 

Della Hansmann  

This is where I wish I could sort of filter this podcast out into the ether, because the people who most need this advice are not the people who are listening right now. They’re not you. The people who most need the advice that they need a big picture plan to allow themselves to go in the right order as they tackle the rest of the layout of their house. Are the people who don’t even know that they should be thinking about design questions before they start. 

Della Hansmann  

They’re the people who found that list online of the essential questions to ask yourself and think all they really need to know is what kind of kitchen counter material they’re looking for before they get started. If you’ve got a friend who’s in this situation, you didn’t have to recommend them to me. 

Della Hansmann  

They may not be mid-century style people at all but maybe give them a little bit of the advice of this podcast that taking a few moments to ask yourself about your experience level, about your energy is so valuable, it really can’t be overstated. Now I’ve spent so much time in this particular episode talking about experience with remodeling, with energy available, with how to. 

Della Hansmann  

So look inward at yourself and see what you realistically want to put out as you plan a remodel. Whether you’re looking for the guidance you need to do a step by step, owner led project where you’re calling every subcontractor and picking every material by hand, or whether you’re really handing it off to the vision of a team that’s going to make what you want happen and just check it by you. 

Della Hansmann  

I’ve just brushed by the question of mid-century taste and style. This really gets to the spiral, repeating, circling nature of the mid-century Master Plan method, which walks you through the steps of dreaming about what matters most to you, discovering the facts, the necessary things about your house, distilling your personal mid-century style, whether it’s a time capsule, vintage or something more updated that still feels in line with those timeless materials, and then drafting options that you can compare and contrast to know you’re going the right direction. 

Della Hansmann  

And the last step is to develop a master plan that you can share with the team that will help you make it happen. That last step involves some of these questions that I like to ask first, and that’s because it really there are a number of times when you’re going to go around and hit every single moment in this process, but I really am asking these questions first, because for me as the designer, and for you, if you’re doing this on your own, if you’re thinking about how best to manage a remodel, ultimately, the remodel itself will ask. 

Della Hansmann  

Will need you to dive into all of the questions around taste and design goals and what areas matter most to you, more so than rooms, the spaces and the feelings they’re trying to create, but before you’re even queuing how big of a change you wish to make, this takes us back to the point I made in the episode at the beginning of this season. We do want to start from where you are. Start from reality. 

Della Hansmann  

So again, before you start imagining the perfect, the ideal, the dream scenario, the magazine quality remodel that you hypothetically could put together, beginning from who you are right now, what life stage you’re in your sort of moment in this season, to borrow a phrase from the lazy genius, is going to help you then move forward through all of those other questions, of design, of taste, of scale, more realistically and get more satisfaction out of the whole process. So if you’re thinking specifically of reaching out to work with Mid Mod Midwest at some point this year, next year. 

Della Hansmann  

I would urge you not to hesitate, because the sooner you start doing this master plan thinking, the longer you have to let it deepen, the more you can jump in on a little project, satisfyingly right away that will build to a bigger project, organically over time. And the less you’re spending wishing for something, waiting for something, and the more you’re actually imagining it, dreaming of it, getting into the details of it. It’s a really fun process. 

Della Hansmann  

If you’re thinking about making that call, you don’t need to know very much to fill out the work with us. Form a few facts about your house when it was built, what’s been done to it, a thumbnail overview of the things that are bugging you the most and the hoped for elements you really want to add is going to give me the starting point to say yes to a conversation, but what you might want to think about before we have that conversation are some of the questions that any architect should ask you before embarking on a remodel. 

Della Hansmann  

And that I will ask you on that call, the story of how you found Your house, whether it was a happenstance forced by circumstances or something you were seeking out specifically for years before you found the ideal place. Questions like, what have you managed to take on about the house so far? What have you been forced to do by necessity? What have you chosen to do? 

Della Hansmann  

And what are you feeling held back from by indecision, by it being too much to take on, by not knowing what’s the best order to go forward from this point and the scale of the energy that you both have experienced in the past putting into a remodel, both in management and actual hands on work, and the scale of what you think you might be likely to go forward with based on your past experience. 

Della Hansmann  

Knowing these things about yourself sets you up for all the other important design and lifestyle questions that will come up through the rest of the remodel, and even those finished questions that to do checklists that a kitchen store employee will ask you, like, what kind of cabinet doors are you looking for and what is your choice of countertop? 

Della Hansmann  

I would advise you not to get bogged down in those detailed questions before you’ve answered the bigger what matters most questions in your remodel, and also before you’ve answered the questions that you can ask yourself about you. Your experience and your enthusiasm. By the way, even if you’ve never remodeled before, there are parallels to get into knowing how hands on you like to be with a project, how much you feel that it’s fun to get into the nitty gritty details and to research and compare and familiarize yourself with history and possibilities. 

Della Hansmann  

Versus how much you like to lock in one decision and then make a few other choices based on it and move on with your life, versus have an array a menu of options presented to you that you can point at and pick from. There are other elements, other experiences in your life that you might be able to make parallels to one might be the way you think about planning travel. So I’ve talked about using planning a vacation as a model for remodeling thinking before. 

Della Hansmann  

I think I framed it as a way to put off the question when people ask, what will it cost to remodel my kitchen? And I’ve said in the past, I can’t know the answer to that until I know exactly what kind of kitchen remodel we’re talking about any more than I can tell any more than I can tell you what it would cost you to take a vacation to Europe unless I know whether you’re going to stay in hostels and bum around on local busses, or whether you’re planning for a cruise line vacation or anything in between. 

Della Hansmann  

But you can use the model of how you think about planning to get away, whether it’s going on a fun trip to another country or just going to visit family in another town, how much are you preplanning? How much are you researching? How much do you enjoy that process? Do you want to hand that off to someone else? Do you ask the host of your trip or a tour guide to sort of lay out all of your options and give you no choices, or just a few menu options to choose from. 

Della Hansmann  

Or do you enjoy getting every travel guide, reading every blog, picking up some history books, looking for locations off the beaten path, making your own assessments about what’s the best place to stay and why, even if you’ve never planned to remodel before, you can use something like that, or your project management style at work, or the way that you’ve tackled a hobby or a craft experience in the past as a mental model for the way you might like to approach a project like this.

Della Hansmann  

Before we wrap up today, it’s time for our mid-century house feature of the week, and this week I wanted to do something that was kitchen related, but not necessarily kitchen design related, because, yay, the kitchen clinic is coming up. 

Della Hansmann  

So this is a mid-century house feature that got knocked out in the very first round of the mid mod madness, March Madness game last spring. But I still love it. It is the kitchen doorbell. 

Della Hansmann  

Do you have one? Does your mid-century house have a doorbell on the outside of the kitchen door? Did it ever if you can figure that out, I would love to know it. I found this in a number of homes, including my own, and I was really puzzled by it. 

Della Hansmann  

I actually it’s one of my personal House Remodeling regrets. I did an episode on this last fall, and I don’t think I put in dismantle the doorbell, but I did. I had an original functional doorbell that was broken. The bell mechanism on the inside of the house buzzed all the time at a low level, and it was driving me nuts. And rather than figure out how to repair that myself or find someone who could, I just disconnected it, and then later, when we did some wiring work in the basement, I let the electrician just take it apart, which honestly, it makes me sad. I had a good, functional, original, mid-century working doorbell. 

Della Hansmann  

Well, nonfunctional, non-working, but I had one I could have tackled and I took it apart. So sad. But one of the weird and cool features of that doorbell was it was connected to buttons on the outside of the house, one by the front door and one by the kitchen door, the kitchen doorbell. 

Della Hansmann  

And I think this is such an interesting remnant of neighborliness. I know from anecdotal stories about my area that a bunch of my neighbors up and down the block had shared keys with each other. I have keys too. I should let my new neighbors know. Now, all of the elderly neighbors have gone, but when I moved into this house, I was chattily informed that they all had keys to my house, and I didn’t bother to re key it, because they all seemed fine. 

Della Hansmann  

Nobody ever came over and did anything with it, but that they would pop into each other’s houses over the years for a cup of sugar or coffee, literally just a daily chat going in and out through the kitchen door. And I think it’s an interesting question, what who comes in your kitchen door these days? Speaking of questions your architect should ask you; this is absolutely a question I ask clients in their current house, and how would they like it to be? Who uses your front door? Do you use your front door and who you friends, family, et cetera, use other doors to the house? 

Della Hansmann  

That question comes much later, deep into the design process, but it is a question that you should ask yourself, and then an architect should ask you so. Yeah. I also think that the kitchen doorbell is an interesting remnant. It’s one of those the mid-century is the cross point, the tipping point between the past and the present. 

Della Hansmann  

It has the craft, the skills, the old growth wood of an older era of home construction, and yet the new the modern layouts that we find more familiar in our living style, but that kitchen doorbell is also a remnant of an older era of delivery culture, unlike today, when we are so able to have things drop shipped from a web order and delivered from one side of the country or the globe to another, the mid-century was the end of an era of local delivery culture. 

Della Hansmann  

Milk probably produce other items, maybe even a laundry service, not to a mid-century home, because this was starting to be the moment for laundry machines in your house. But before that, it might have come not based on a few clicks but based on a relationship with a local business. Total sidebar, when I lived in Chicago, one of my favorite things about that particular city is its alley culture. The alleys of Chicago are where garbage is delivered, where sort of service, traffic, delivery, moving trucks go to the alley. 

Della Hansmann  

And that’s because every home, every single family, house, every flat, you know, three flat, two flat, stacked house, every apartment that’s not actually like a hotel style from the prewar era or a modern, high rise style apartment has two access points, one off the front street and one that goes to the alley, and that alley access is through a kitchen door that allows for those local services, laundry, produce, milk, repair work to be delivered via the kitchen door. 

Della Hansmann  

Anyway, does your house have a mid-century kitchen doorbell? And just a general question, how does your house do its way finding, where do your packages tend to wash up, where they get delivered correctly or incorrectly? And do people know how to find the best used door in your house. If not, that might be a problem design can solve. This has been the mid-century house feature of the week, a kitchen doorbell. 

Della Hansmann  

To wrap up. I really want you to come to the mid-century kitchen design clinic. That’s happening on Saturday, February 8, if you’ve come before and not taken action on your kitchen yet, you might want to just come again. It’s a wonderful way to get your energy up, to get your questions answered, to feel the mood of other people that love their mid-century house but want to make some adjustments to it, and to just feel fired up and excited about the prospect of making adjustments, making improvements to your mid-century home and at the early bird price, honestly, it’s such a steal. 

Della Hansmann  

You could come just for the community, but also, you’ll get to see all of the kitchen updates that I’ll be adding to the clinic from years past, based on the last year of Master Plan experience. If you have never come to one of our mid-century design clinics before I absolutely would love to see you there. They are fun. They are energetic. I will be asking you to stay involved, to think about real answers to the questions that apply to your home right now your kitchen. 

Della Hansmann  

You will be asked to get a tape measure and measure a few key elements of your kitchen. I will be asking you to think about the qualities of kitchen that matter the most to you, we will be doing hands on Pinterest exercise to think about how to find good inspiration that’s practical and effective for your house. 

Della Hansmann  

And you will see dozens and dozens of examples of mid-century kitchens. I bet I can show you a kitchen layout that has the same problems that yours does, and solutions for how to make those problems better. It’s a really fun event, and I only have time to do it live once per year. So if you don’t want to get stuck watching the recording, which is also incredibly useful, and go at your own pace, but I encourage you, if you’re listening to this live, come to the live kitchen clinic. It’s going to be a blast. 

Della Hansmann  

Go sign up by going to mid mod dash midwest.com/clinic and next week, I will actually be highlighting a kitchen feature. We’ll be talking about lighting in mid-century houses. Lighting, in general, is a challenge in mid-century houses. It’s a question I get asked all the time. It is something I work with mid-century Master Plan clients on and also constantly workshop within my ready to remodel program, but I’m going to be focusing it a little bit on the kitchen specifically in honor of the upcoming mid-century kitchen workshop. 

Della Hansmann  

So tune in next week for some more practical advice on how to choose right lighting, where you want to put lighting, how you actually want to push back on your contractor’s suggestion to put in can lights everywhere you probably don’t need them, and how to create a lighting effect that works really well in the mid-century. House that you have. See you next week.

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