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Remodeling Cost Mindset Reset

28 min readLet’s reframe the four financial fallacies that hold most people back from kicking off their remodeling plans.

If you’ve been holding off on home updates because of worries about the remodeling cost, I’m here to shift your mindset.

Let’s tackle the most common budget myths that might be holding you back, and talk about how you can plan a remodel you’ll love with the budget you have.

Any remodeling project comes with costs. And it is often expensive. But often what holds would-be remodelers back are the stories we tell ourselves about money. 

Through my conversations with clients and students, I’ve come to believe there are four common financial fallacies that stop people from improving their homes.

You don’t have any money for remodeling.

Even small, budget-friendly changes can make a big impact. Start with a Level One remodel: think paint, swapping light fixtures, or decluttering and styling a space. Tiny updates can give you a sense of progress and momentum.

You don’t have enough money for remodeling you want to take on

If a full-scale remodel feels out of reach, break it into phases. Tackle the most important area first—like the kitchen or owner’s suite—and leave the rest for later. Start with a master plan to ensure your phased remodel stays cohesive and strategic.

You don’t even know what a remodel would cost, but you’re pretty sure it would be super expensive

Uncertainty about costs can be paralyzing. The solution? Start planning! Once you outline your priorities and get real-world pricing, you’ll feel more in control of your budget and better able to save toward your goals.

You don’t have a house you feel like it’s worth remodeling.  And the home of your dreams is too expensive.  

Whether your mid-century home is modest, flipped beyond recognition, or missing character, it can still become the home of your dreams. Charm, style, and flow can always be brought back in—even on a budget.

Long story short … you can improve the house you have … a little or a lot … no matter what your budget it!

Quick Design tip for your…bathroom update

Bathrooms are one of the most personal spaces in your home, so your design choices should match your needs—not what you think you “should” have.

Make your bathroom work for the way you live now (and in the future). Grab my Bath Update Essentials guide and get planning!

Mid Mod House Feature of the Week

Mid-Century Holiday Decor – Evergleam Christmas Trees

Let’s celebrate the iconic Evergleam aluminum Christmas tree! These shiny, space-age beauties were a mid-century holiday sensation, produced by the millions in the late 1950s and early ‘60s. With their minimalist design and twinkling brilliance, they were the perfect modern alternative to traditional trees.

But their popularity ended abruptly after the 1965 airing of A Charlie Brown Christmas, where a real, scrappy tree triumphed over Lucy’s bright pink aluminum pick. Whether you’re team tinsel, fresh pine, or minimal decor, the key to holiday cheer is finding what makes you happy!

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Read the Full Episode Transcript

Della Hansmann 

So taking on a remodel project can be expensive. That’s something that I just can’t lie about. But I run into so many people who are holding themselves back from the house of their dreams because of one of several financial and budgeting fallacies that they just whisper to themselves in the dark of the night and repeat out loud over and over again.

Della Hansmann 

If the cost of remodeling is what’s holding you back from making any changes to your home in the past and in the future. I want to talk about reframing your mindset around the cost of remodel for next year. Also in this episode, I’ll share my tips for how to make really personal for you choices in your bath update so you can spend your dollars wisely.

Della Hansmann 

And let’s shout out the fun holiday decor of the mid-century era. Do you love it? Do you have in your house? Okay, let’s get into it.

Della Hansmann 

Hey there. Welcome back to mid mod remodel. This is a 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 1911.

Della Hansmann 

All right, before I get into it, a couple of items of business. Mid mod Midwest is going to be closed for the next two weeks, and we’ll also be taking two weeks off from the podcast. I know I’m sorry. I hate it when my own favorite podcasts go on hiatus, but I am a person. Mid mod Midwest is three people, and we all need to recharge. It’s a good thing for you in the long run, I promise. If we’ve already got you on our email list, I will be sending out a regular Thursday email over the next two weeks with some of your and my favorite past podcast episodes.

Della Hansmann 

I’ve been recording Since 2019 and I bet you have not listened to every episode. If you have, you might like a replay of one of the best. So we’ll have suggestions for you on each of the next two weeks. We won’t be in your podcast feed, but there is plenty to listen to in the back catalog.

Della Hansmann 

There’s also still plenty of time to gift someone in your life the gift of design. You can sign them up for one of our mid-century design clinics for a consult call in the new year, or get the process started of working with mid mod Midwest. Now I said we will be closed for two weeks, which means we won’t see your application emails come in to work with us, but you can still fill one in, and when we get back in the new year, we will reach out to set up time to schedule a conversation.

Della Hansmann 

Our apply to work with us page does have a little form to fill out, but it’s so simple. You don’t need to have floor plans and details on a budget. You do not need a budget. We’ll get into that later in this episode, but you do need to just tell us a little bit about your house when it was built, how you found it, your family, what you like, what you need, and what you are thinking might be on your to do list for the house. I can’t wait to talk to you about it in January.

Della Hansmann 

All right, let’s get into our design tip for this week, and I want to talk about making really personalized choices. This ties in with the episode perfectly. In fact, our design tip this week is about bathrooms, and specifically how to choose bath fixtures that you will actually use.

Della Hansmann 

Good design is personal. It always starts from what you need. So think about the number of people using a bathroom space and what it’s mostly for. For example, an owner’s bathroom is going to have a different layout as well as a different look from a guest powder room or a hard working whole family bathroom while keeping plumbing exactly where it is the most cost effective option.

Della Hansmann 

You also want to think about functionality, feel free to mix up the fixtures that you have, replace a tub with a shower, add in a bidet, switch out a vanity counter for extra sync or vice versa, and think forward towards your future needs. If you can now is the easiest time to plan for accessibility in a bathroom, when you’re thinking about which fixtures you want, choose the fixtures you will actually use, and by you, I mean whoever is using that specific bathroom.

Della Hansmann 

So answer the question of one sink or two and how much adjacent vanity and storage space you need. You might want to keep it small, to avoid clutter, to discourage yourself or another family member from spreading out things all over, or maybe you want plenty of surface area for the bath, toys, makeup, counter, medicine, everything Suit yourself.

Della Hansmann 

You can think about adding in a bidet or a toilet attachment. This is also a good time to ask yourself if you would really prefer that your toilet be set off in a separate niche for privacy or more effective space sharing. This is actually something that’s coming up more and more with my clients, particularly for owners’ bathrooms, but also for bathrooms are going to be shared with family members or with guests. Having the toilet in a separate space means someone can use the vanity to wash their hands at any time, regardless of the rest of the bathroom.

Della Hansmann 

You also want to think about the tub, shower or both question and will they be separate or connected to each other, consider what you’ve got space for and then prioritize. Most mid-century bathrooms have a shallow child only tub that doubles as a shower, but most modern homeowners prefer to step, or perhaps be able to roll, in the future, right into a shower for their daily wash up, plus adding in a true soaking tub if they really enjoy bathing.

Della Hansmann 

So if you enjoy bathing, give yourself a bathtub. But if you don’t, you don’t necessarily need one. I’m not a big believer that you must have a tub in the house. If you don’t have small children that need little baths, and you don’t have regular guests that are going to do that, knock yourself out. Frankly, even if you do, it’s fairly easy to get a really cute access. Plastic tub, a baby tub, a toddler tub, to wash a child in a shower and then move it out of the way, store it somewhere else when not used.

Della Hansmann 

One thing to think about is, I do like to do a glass shower enclosure where possible, and sometimes to combine that shower and tub in the same glass enclosure so you can have a wet or a humid area of the bathroom. But you also want to think about practicality. If you’ve got multiple family members using a bathroom at once, a shower curtain is a more privacy friendly option.

Della Hansmann 

Remember to ask yourself, what will I actually use and what will make me and the rest of the bath users happier on a daily basis? If you want five more essential elements of a great Mid-century Modern bath update. You can grab them at mid ma midwest.com/bath, where I’ve put together a guide of all the things you want to think about in order to do clever, beautiful space planning and create practical setup for your remodel, whether you’re starting from an original mid-century era bath or one that’s been updated so much that you’re kind of starting from scratch, one way or another, you want to plan a bath update just right. Spend the square inches, square feet and dollars as effectively as possible, as always.

Della Hansmann 

Find the references, the transcripts, the links, the photos on the show notes page at mid mod midwest.com/ 1911 Okay. Today I want to talk about your mindset around the costs of a remodel, and specifically how they may have been holding you back, and how, if you shift your mindset, the way that you think about remodeling costs, you may open up more possibilities for taking on the home changes that you want to make in 2025.

Della Hansmann 

I’m going to frame this around some of the most common objections, worries, concerns that I hear from people who have become my clients, from people who reach out to me on Instagram, from friends I chat with about their adventures in early home ownership. And there are some very common categories of financial worries that prevent people from taking any action at all, making any improvement at all to their home.

Della Hansmann 

The first one is that you have no money at all for remodeling. The second is that you don’t have enough money for the remodeling you think you want to take on. The third is you don’t even know what a remodel would cost, but you’re pretty sure it would be super expensive. And the fourth is you don’t have a house you feel like it’s worth remodeling, and the home of your dreams is, you know, from Zillow haunting, way too expensive.

Della Hansmann 

Now, there are also separate objections that hold people back, that have to do with time. You don’t have enough time to plan and kick off a remodel right now, that is related, but that feels like enough of a separate issue that I’ll leave that for another podcast episode today I want to talk about how our beliefs about money and what a remodeling will cost and how to organize it can hold us back from getting started.

Della Hansmann 

Now that’s not to say that belief is what’s making your remodel expensive, that the way you think about it is affecting your bank account. And I don’t want to suggest that you should just bite the bullet, cut other expenses and plan for a remodel. I do want to suggest that having a home you love is really important, and there are ways along a whole spectrum of changes that you can approach, to change your house in small ways or large, to make it a better launching point for your life, a better nest to return to at the end of a long, hard day, as I was just talking about last week, a better place to do your long, hard day of work in the first place.

Della Hansmann 

And I’m a big believer in making improvements to houses, whether or not they are particularly expensive, is not my concern. I want to know that they are particularly effective. So I should also frame this by saying that I’ve said, as I’ve said before, the cost of your remodel and what you take on in a remodel are inextricably linked. For me to say that it doesn’t matter what you’re going to take on won’t make your house more expensive is a silly lie.

Della Hansmann 

But I don’t need you to feel controlled by cost as a factor of, should you remodel at all? Should you change your home at all? And I want you to feel like I said in the episode earlier this season about staying in charge of the cost of your remodel, having a sense of control, having a sense of knowing why you’re spending money on what, what a priority it will be for you, allows you to say no to certain things and yes to others. But right now, we’re looking ahead. We’re looking to 2025 which I still I’m so hung up on, how that date in particular feels so much more like the science fiction future to me than 2024 does.

Della Hansmann 

But it’s coming, and a lot of people are thinking now about how they’re going to take a deep breath, rest and relax, hopefully, possibly run through a crazy to do list before the end of this year, then reset and make new goals for next year. This is the way that we run our calendars, our society, our schedules. We always take this sort of end of year, beginning of year moment as a time to make big picture plans. Those big picture plans may or may not actually survive their first contact with reality when we get into 2025. But does not hurt you to get a good can do mindset, pull together for next year.

Della Hansmann 

So let’s talk about that first objection, and maybe this is personally to me. This is one of my most I want you to not think about it this way. I want you to change the way you think about it. If you have nothing to spend on a remodel right now, I have been there too. Now this does not actually mean you’ve got $0 in your bank.

Della Hansmann 

Of course you have money in the bank account, but it’s designated for other things. So actually, before I dig deeply into this, I just want to give a shout out to my favorite budgeting software. You need a budget otherwise known as YNAB y NAB. This simple program changed the way I manage money in my business and also my personal life a few years ago when it was recommended to me by a friend, and unlike the more popular commercial apps like mint, which I think has just gone away, and there’s a new one that’s replacing it, that just kind of you categorize the way you’re spending your money, and it tells you how you spend your money.

Della Hansmann 

YNAB notices how you spend your money and asks you to plan where you would like to spend it, to give every dollar in your bank account a job, and some of it is going to come up for the daily necessities you’ll have, groceries, gas, keeping the lights on. Some of it goes to annual expenses that come up that are easy to forget, like insurance, school fees, subscriptions.

Della Hansmann 

And some of it is designated towards irregular but inevitable expenses like cars repair and maintenance, or house repair and maintenance, or an unexpected trip to fly out and care for a family member in a pinch. But you can also designate some of your dollars towards fun things like travel, family visits and on emergencies, toys and a remodel. For me, designating all of my dollars to jobs means I can feel super confident that I’m saving for what I want to save for, and I can encourage myself to spend more in some areas where I want to.

Della Hansmann 

I have a set amount that I put aside for fun outside my house every month because I am such a raging introvert and I want to be a little bit more connected in my community. And I also set aside money for vintage nonsense, largely made out of brass that I see on the internet and love. And I used to tell myself I couldn’t afford it, and now I’ve realized having it makes me happy, and being able to splurge on something because I have set that money aside is great. I also save towards house changes I want to make, but I am the most by the bootstraps of remodelers.

Della Hansmann 

So while we’re back to number one when you have $0 available, or almost $0 available for home improvement. I don’t want you to think I can’t improve my home. Okay, so you’re not gonna demolish and rebuild your kitchen from scratch this year, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing you can do to make your kitchen a little better.

Della Hansmann 

And this is where the concept of the level one remodel project comes in. A level one remodel is a tiny thing you do. It’s something you thrift or find an object on Facebook marketplace and bring it home and hang it onto the wall, replacing the cool light bulbs in your light fixtures with warm ones to make it feel like you’re actually at home in your house, painting over the previous owner’s trendy accent wall that makes your headache every time you look at it.

Della Hansmann 

If you want to learn more about starting small, I’ve talked about this on previous podcast episodes, and I’ve got a number of resources around it. So check out. Let’s see probably my room, recipe, freebie. I first talked about this in January of 2020, so the episode of the podcast is going to be 203, that’s Season Two. I’ve been doing this podcast for a minute. Like I said, there are many back catalog episodes to go check out.

Della Hansmann 

You can also just go get my free PDF download about how to put together a room recipe and how to make those level one changes at mid ma midwest.com/room recipe. So I want you to think about the possibility of making little changes and these, as I’ve said before, these can snowball into bigger changes, and you can start to see if you have the skill and the wherewithal to hang something on your wall you might think about being able to remove something you don’t like.

Della Hansmann 

You can teach yourself a few DIY skills. You can save up and encourage a friend who’s handier than you to come over and pay them in beer and pizza to help you with a project I myself have been paid in beer pizza and friendship to help my friends with many home improvement projects, ranging from rewiring light fixtures to removing doors to get an open doorway to prying out built ins, painting projects, you probably have a handy friend you could enlist in this. So there is a lot to be earned with elbow grease, and there’s also a lot that you can do making small but important changes to your house.

Della Hansmann 

I know this doesn’t feel quite as exciting as a brand new kitchen, but it is different than saying I don’t have money available, therefore I can make no changes to my house. You can. You can make some changes, and I want you to get started making your house a little bit more perfect for you, a little bit more lovable, a little bit more well suited to your style, your personality, and beyond that, perhaps that’ll then motivate you to save or learn skills or take on more into a bigger remodel in the future, or as is often the case, a relatively modest mid-century house can be made pretty darn charming by a few well thought out treats.

Della Hansmann 

By sourcing the right furniture, by making changes that are smaller and much less expensive than a full scale remodel. So if we’re thinking about a more expensive remodel, though, let’s talk about when you’ve been saving up for a while, but you don’t have enough for well, we’ll get into that in a minute.

Della Hansmann 

What if you have some money in the bank for remodeling, but it’s not enough? This is one I hear all the time, because people in this stage, if this is you, this is the kind of person who often reaches out to me to say, you know, we want to get started, but we don’t have it all saved yet. What are we going to do? Can we have everything we want? Can it be cheaper?

Della Hansmann 

People sometimes come at me annoyed that contractors are as expensive as they are, and that’s really beyond my control. But I do have three different suggestions for thinking about this problem. If this is your problem, there are. Let’s do three different approaches. The first mindset shift you might consider is to revise your overall goals. Here’s a tease of an episode I’ll be putting together in January based on the fabulous new book by Kendra Adachi, the plan. Have you already got it? Gift yourself the plan for Christmas better yet, get one for yourself and give one to your most we share the same level of stress and overwhelm friend and then start a two person book club about it. I did that with my sister, by the way. Anyway, I’ll have more to say about this book and how I think it applies to Remodeling in January.

Della Hansmann 

But for now, I’m going to refer you to a really great component of that book, to quote Kendra. Ask yourself, Does my expectation match the level of energy I’m willing to give right now? This is true for everything from what you’re gonna make for dinner tonight, if you’re wishing for something home cooked gourmet, but you’ve only got the energy to microwave something or call for delivery.

Della Hansmann 

You’ve really got two ways to be happy about this. You can cut something else out of your life to make the time and energy for a bigger kitchen production, or you can just reset your expectations to be reasonably happy with a little less tonight, and that goes all the way up the scale. I’m not telling you to settle for less in your remodel. I’m inviting you to ask yourself how your vision and your available resources match and then tweak one or the other until they do.

Della Hansmann 

The next way to approach this particular objection is you can start with part of your remodel if you don’t have enough saved up to tackle a full gut demo of your entire house. What if you just spent it all on the kitchen? Having a really great kitchen is not the least expensive part of a remodel, but it’s less expensive than doing everything, and it is the heart of most houses. It could really set the tone for everything you plan to do in the future, and having a shiny, perfect, bright kitchen can really help you gloss over any other inadequacies in the rest of the house.

Della Hansmann 

Or if you’re more of a person whose whole day is calibrated by the way you start it, maybe the kitchen doesn’t the most important thing. Maybe all you really need to spend your first batch of dollars on is your owner’s bathroom and perhaps a little bit of extra money for good built ins in your owner’s bedroom. And then knowing that that place is your refuge, your sanctuary. Sanctuary, your jumping off point, that gets you ready to go out and get out of the house and spend time in the world and be more happy with the rest of the situation, you can always get a more overall cost effective remodel by doing everything at one time.

Della Hansmann 

That is to say, if you think about the lifetime cost of remodeling into a house, it’s probably going to be more cost effective to wait and do one big body of work, because you’re getting plumbers coming out to do every bit of plumbing in the house. You’re getting an electrician to come out once all the crews, of people, all of the organization, the overhead, the management that said it’s often far more realistic to think about breaking your project apart into phases.

Della Hansmann 

And one of the things I recommend to many of my master plan clients is to think about of everything they want to do in the house eventually, what is the most important to them, the most necessary, frustrating part that they really need to address first, and what also could be bundled with that for maximum efficiency, versus parts that could be spun off and done separately later, potentially not even at all.

Della Hansmann 

Thinking about the way to break up a house into bite sized or budget sized projects is done best after you have done all your master plan thinking. But having done all your master plan thinking also really puts you in a position of having dug deeply into your priorities so you can know that you’re spending the money that you have right now on the most important to you parts of the house.

Della Hansmann 

The third way to think about a question of I have some of the money saved up, but not everything I need is you could look for a way to cut costs. Some of my clients come to me for a master plan and then self-manage or even DIY parts of their remodel. If you’ve got the energy and the interest in learning how to do this, it can be a really effective way to cut down the overall bottom line, value of the house. This is a place where I pull back to that universal truism that you can have two things in a design out of three.

Della Hansmann 

You can have fast, cheap or good. You can’t have all three. You can’t have fast, cheap and good. But if you’re willing to slow down the process, this might be breaking into phases that might mean DIY wiring. This might mean working with a contractor who is more of a handyman level and is going to come over when they have availability rather than when you immediately desire them.

Della Hansmann 

All of these things can help you lower the dollar value of your remodel without lowering the ultimate outcome, without reducing the quality, the good of it. So you don’t really need to see the image of this Venn diagram, fast, cheap and good, but I recommend you go over the show notes page mid mod midwest.com/ 1911 and just contemplate it for a minute.

Della Hansmann 

It is, it is the truth. I have to remind myself of it generally. And I also like to just remind my clients and students the factor you may be able to manipulate in order to make a good remodel more affordable is time. And I don’t just mean sitting around waiting time. I mean the time that it takes to actually affect the construction.

Della Hansmann 

What you don’t want to be slow about is planning. The sooner you have an effective plan in mind, the sooner you can think about how to strategically tackle the parts of your remodel that are available to you right now and move them forward effectively into getting some changes done.

Della Hansmann 

Maybe level one changes, maybe level two, DIY changes, maybe a full general contractor remodel of the most important part of the house. Okay, the third objection I hear really commonly and fairly very much stressing people out is I don’t even know what a remodel will cost. I’m pretty sure it’ll be expensive, and I’m pretty sure I don’t have enough money saved up for it, but a lot of people feel anxiety about the potential cost of a remodel, and channel that into wanting to put a control around it. Maybe that’s coming up with an arbitrary number saying I want to remodel my kitchen for $60,000.

Della Hansmann 

Okay, that is nice. That’s a nice goal to have, but to be frank, most kitchen remodels cost more than $60,000 these days. Although they absolutely do not have to, depending on the scale. But the mount, the amount of things you take on in your remodel are going to dramatically influence what your remodel costs. You are not and I am not in control of labor and materials costs, but you can control and I and a master plan process can certainly help you choose.

Della Hansmann 

What are the things you want to change, the qualities you want to change about your house. You want to modify it in order to love it more, and that might be a whole surface level of shiny new materials, or it might be the quality of daylight that comes into the house or a place that doesn’t connect properly, or not having the right room to support having company over, or spending more time with your family at a particular time of day, or even just too much visible clutter in your face that needs more storage spaces.

Della Hansmann 

Those individual problems are not necessarily a $60,000 kitchen remodel. They might be more about creating a little bit of overflow pantry space in an unused bedroom so that you can take some of the pressure off the kitchen you have, and perhaps a surface update of cabinet faces, but not changing the layout or perhaps sourcing around until you can find seconds of cabinet pieces or haunting the Restore.

Della Hansmann 

There are a million different ways to control the scope and scale of a project, and the best way to get the most out of your model is not to try to cut costs, not to say we’re only going to source our tile from The Tile Shop. We won’t be getting fire clay. It’s to say, is tile a more an important part of this project to us at all? Maybe it is. Maybe tile, the surface you wipe down around your stovetop, is the most important thing about your kitchen to you. For a lot of people, they both really value and get excited about beautiful final surfaces like tile, and also, they judge themselves for it. They feel like, Oh no, that’s too expensive, and in the cost of everything else, we can’t do this.

Della Hansmann 

I would say, if you’re motivated by the surface effect of your tile, we want to think about how to make less expensive changes to the layout. Perhaps, if you came to me saying you wanted to put on an addition for a bigger kitchen, instead, we would try to see if we could squeeze better, effective use of space out of the footprint you have save the cost of new structure, new footprint, new foundation, new roof, and put that into, among other things, beautiful tile.

Della Hansmann 

So to come back to the budget fallacies that might be holding you back from starting on your home, if what you’ve got in your head is that you don’t even know what a remodel will cost, then the most important thing you can do now is start to plan it. Start to plan it. And I’ve said this so many times before, before you’ve saved up what you assume to be the budget, because once you have a master plan in mind, once you’ve considered what needs to change about your house and weigh the pros and cons of different areas that could be changed, and then you start to get some initial pricing from contractors based on real world labor and material costs.

Della Hansmann 

Then you might find that you have saved enough and you’re ready to go particularly on the first, most important part, or you might find that you haven’t saved enough, but now you know what your goal is, and you can more effectively throw. Energy at that, save on a few takeout dinners, maybe plan a more budget vacation, because it’s worth it to you to prioritize the value of what you’re going to get done.

Della Hansmann 

The fourth budget consideration that holds a lot of people back is that they just feel like their house right now isn’t ever going to be as good as the dream house they have fixated on based on, I won’t say too much, but let’s say a lot of time spent on mid-century Instagram and poring over the pages of atomic range magazine, going on home tours in your neighborhood, or taking a vacation to Palm Springs.

Della Hansmann 

When you look at a little mid-century modest 1950s ranch house, or even a cottage style mid-century house in the Midwest, and you compare it to a cliff may or an Eichler in California, it can very easily feel like your house just isn’t as cool as that, and there’s no hope. So why even bother?

Della Hansmann 

This is a song I sing again and again, but there are so many ways to make a modest house into much more mid-century charming one, and to suit it to exactly your style, your mid-century moment, your level of preservation versus updating, whether your house has been flipped in the past and really stripped of a lot of its original character, or whether it never had all that much high end mid-century design Zuzh in the first place. We can build those things back in.

Della Hansmann 

And starting from the house you have is a perfectly workable, in my opinion, one of the best ways to really create the mid-century house of your dreams. For one thing, it’s probably in a place you like. It’s near people you like. It’s near your daily work and routines, perhaps your kids’ school. If you’re not living in a place you like, then that would be my first recommendation, because the one thing a remodel can never fix about your house is location. But I’m a really big believer in the possibility of adding charm, of building that back in, of inserting it, maybe for the first time, into a relatively modest mid-century house.

Della Hansmann 

So when you look at the fancy potion beam homes with walls of glass and magazine photos, the odds are we won’t be able to make a carbon copy of that house and yours, but we can bring more spaciousness, more light, better views of your personal, private spaces outside. We can create the flow you’re looking for. We can really transform your house. So I don’t want you to think that because you can’t buy a turnkey, ready mid-century, modern house of everybody’s dreams. That you can’t have the house of your dreams, it is absolutely possible.

Della Hansmann 

So if any of these four things have been holding you back for the last year, several years since you bought your house, from kicking off, a wish, a plan, a hope for remodel, if you’re worried that you don’t have any money for remodeling, I want you to know that there are changes you can make that might not feel like a capital R remodel, but will make your house better, more suited to you.

Della Hansmann 

Paint and a few small purchases can make a big difference to the way you feel about your house, and maybe set you up for life, or maybe get you started on a motivational project of planning a bigger change in the future. If you don’t have enough remodeling budget saved up to take on the full project you dream of, maybe it’s time to think about breaking it into phases, but with a caveat that I highly recommend you have a full master plan of everything you might do first, so that you don’t end up making choices now that prevent you from making other, bigger, better choices in the future.

Della Hansmann 

If you don’t even know what a remodel would cost, but you’re pretty sure it’ll be too expensive for you, let’s put some real world numbers onto that question. Let’s figure out what kind of a remodel you even want to take on, what’s most important for you and your family and your house and then put some price tags on that so you can start saving up or maybe find out that you’re closer than you think to that remodeling goal.

Della Hansmann 

And finally, if you feel like you don’t have a house that’s worth remodeling, I have never yet met a mid-century house that I didn’t feel like I could make more charming than it was to start with. And in many cases, we’ve been able to turn very modest houses into a master plan client’s absolute dream home. So I invite you to be open to the possibility to think about how you can take a master plan, mid-century, update mindset to your house in the next year, and how you can get started on a project small or large, to make the changes to set up the house you have into being the home you will love to keep living in.

Della Hansmann 

All right, from there, let’s switch into our mid-century house feature this week. Let’s take a detour from the mid-century house features pulled from my mid mod madness matchup and talk about a mid-century holiday idea. I did a little research on tinsel trees and mid-century holiday decor in general. Let’s set to one side the ever horrifying asbestos fake snow that comes in a box you can sprinkle around your house.

Della Hansmann 

And I learned in a little bit of googling today that tinsel, which actually originated in historical Europe, made out of actual silver. Or then became something that was often based in lead, because it didn’t tarnish. It stayed shiny forever. But we realized that lead was also a bad idea for holiday decor. So that was one of the reasons why tinsel hung on holiday trees phased out, and these days, when you see tinsel for holiday trees, it’s made out of PVC, which is kind of less fun, less shiny, it’s less cool.

Della Hansmann 

But my personal favorite mid-century Christmas sticker item is the aluminum tree. These are very popular again now, after languishing in attics and barns for years, but they had a huge burst of popularity. Big swell, big crash from their invention in the late 1950s by modern coatings of Chicago into the early 60s, when they were manufactured by the millions, modern coatings came up with the idea for a set of holes drilled at various angles into a dowel that meant tree branches of the same length could be aimed differentially and create the shape of a tree.

Della Hansmann 

They patented the idea for the angles and came up with the idea for storing the branches in paper tubes, but it was actually a Wisconsin company aluminum specialty based here in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, that had better infrastructure to make it happen and eventually joined forces with modern coding side original inventor.

Della Hansmann 

There’s this really fun Wisconsin Historical Society piece about the Manitowoc company that I’ll link to in the show notes, so be sure to go check that out. It’s really nicely put together. Basically, Evergleam was the flagship product of aluminum specialty, and they manufactured the trees year round, three shifts a day.

Della Hansmann 

There were other brands, but Evergleam was the predominant version. I think the mid-century moderns were drawn to these trees for the same reason that we are again now, they felt different and quirky. They were minimalist and chic, vaguely space age. Ironically, it was another mid-century Christmas classic that was responsible for effectively killing the aluminum tree dead, A Charlie Brown Christmas first aired in 1965 and It pitted Lucy’s choice of a big pink aluminum tree against Charlie’s choice of the only real tree on the lot when he’s sent to go pick up the Christmas tree for their play, a droopy, odd shaped little number.

Della Hansmann 

Spoiler alert for this 59 year old Christmas classic movie, if you don’t know, the others make fun of Charlie Brown’s tree until he himself kind of loses face in it. But in the end, Linus and the others decide to decorate it, and even Lucy agrees that it’s a better choice, and they all sing Hark the herald angels sing and make everyone at home feel like crap about their soulless, fake commercial purchase.

Della Hansmann 

This really did just effectively end the popularity of aluminum Christmas trees, right there in 1965 probably 1966 really. To which I say raspberries as an 80s baby who grew up with some very Charlie Brown style Christmas trees because my parents always cut our own and they liked to walk to the very back of the Christmas tree farm, where the wildest, least groomed options were.

Della Hansmann 

I love a wild tree. Let a tree be a tree but also let people who love modernism be happy with their very regular, very manufactured trees. If it makes them happy, if it makes me happy, I’ll just add that as someone who puts up my Christmas tree right after Thanksgiving and leaves it up till New Years, when it was a real tree, my goodness, did it drop every single needle on the carpet before I could get it out of the house.

Della Hansmann 

And my ever gleam? Well, you know what? It also drops a few little tinsel bits every time I put it up and take it down, but it’s so much easier, and Roxy doesn’t eat them. My personal Christmas taste these days is almost entirely silvery, fake tinsel branches. Actually, my favorite is probably from the 80s, this weird, sad, little, very Charlie brain shaped branch that it’s not even strong enough. It’s clearly made out of little plastic tubes. It’s not even strong enough to support a single ornament, but I prop it in a green flower vase on my desk every year at Christmas, and it makes me so happy.

Della Hansmann 

And all my Christmas decorations are yellow and white, because, again, it makes me so happy. I think this is fair, but I would love to know where you fall on the Christmas tree debate. In my extended family, we have it covered. My sister and brother in law get a real tree every year that decorate in colored lights.

Della Hansmann 

My mom used to cut a tree from their property the last few years and decorate it in sort of a winter wonderland theme of white lights and glass ornaments. In the last year or two, she’s actually used a tabletop modern Christmas tree made of concentric circles suspended from a little post and used fairy lights wrapped around their timber frame house structure to celebrate the holidays.

Della Hansmann 

And I am team tinsel tree for the receivable future. I’d love to know what you’ve got in your house. So shoot me a DM Instagram mid mod Midwest with your own current past holiday tree. Pleasures and memories also pop over to my story on Instagram for a throwback to that year in the pandemic when I bought a tub of random evergreen tree branches and then bought a dowel actually, I think I found the dowel rod in my basement and made samples and drilled it out myself to make the structure for my very own aluminum tree.

Della Hansmann 

It turned out pretty good, I will say. But when I found a fountain style vintage tree with all of the bits intact and its original base a few years ago, still, I did replace it, and I like this better. It’s also smaller, which I used to think the biggest tree possible was the best, and now I think a right size tree is a great example. If that isn’t applicable to my remodeling philosophy, I don’t know what is.

Della Hansmann 

So it does not have to be the most popular, it does not have to be the most expensive. It does not have to be new. You should have the Christmas tree, the holiday decor, the house that makes you happy.

Della Hansmann 

On that note, I’m gonna leave you for 2024 have a really great end of year season, however you choose to celebrate, Solstice is coming right up and the days are going to start getting longer again. Thank goodness, and I will see you with new episodes in 2025.

Della Hansmann 

If you’ve got ideas for what you’d like to hear about next year, shoot an email to Della at mid mod midwest.com, or drop me an Instagram DM and let me know what topics should be on the podcast roster for 2025 Happy Holidays.

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